Racial trauma involves the experience of danger related to both past and ongoing prejudicial treatment, including physical violence, threat of harm, shaming interactions, and ongoing vicarious trauma due to witnessing harm to other Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Complex trauma is an integrative term that encompasses both the exposure to multiple, chronic traumatic experiences AND the wide-ranging and long-term impact of these experiences. As such, racial trauma can be conceptualized as a specific form of complex trauma.

 Beginning in childhood, Black people are often subject to a surrounding environment fraught with threats to physical and psychological safety and sense of self. Contemporary scholars have detailed the embodied traumatic experience of BIPOC, who face bodily harm and relentless physical boundary violations at the hands of the majority culture. Congruent with psychological maltreatment, racial trauma also involves ongoing insidious affronts to the emotional experience, identity, and core value of Black people – from microaggressions to overtly discriminatory verbal abuse. In addition, vicarious exposure to chronic racial violence – witnessing the denigration, invalidation, threat toward other persons and communities of color - represents a prolonged exposure.
— The Foundation Trust