The Impact of Racial Discrimination on Mental Health
- W
- Jun 19
- 5 min read
I was stationed at AFSOUTH HQ overseas in Italy, a senior NCO with a few years in, when a colonel I’d never met told me I was “well-spoken.” That experience made me reflect on the ways Racial Discrimination can manifest in everyday interactions. He meant it as a compliment. I know that because he smiled when he said it, the way people smile when they think they’ve just done something good.
I said, “Thank you, sir,” and kept walking.
That night I lay awake for two hours trying to figure out why it still sat wrong. It was not a slur. It was not a threat. He had not followed me to my car. By every definition I had available to me at the time, nothing happened.
That is the thing about what we call microaggressions. The word makes them sound small. But the small ones are the ones that wake you up at 2 a.m., because they don’t give you anything clean to be angry about. They leave you auditing yourself. Did I hear that right? Am I being too sensitive? And then, worse: Maybe he’s right to be surprised. Racial Discrimination can be subtle and still deeply harmful.
That last thought is the damage. Not the colonel. Not the comment. The damage is the moment you start wondering if the low expectation was warranted.
I have spent more than two decades writing and talking about PTSD. The clinical definition is a stress response that stays activated after the threat is gone. What I have come to understand is that chronic exposure to racial discrimination produces something mechanically similar. The body learns to scan. The nervous system learns that certain rooms, certain tones of voice, certain pauses before certain words are signals. It doesn’t need a dramatic incident to stay on alert. The small ones are enough to keep the switch flipped. Additionally, these experiences highlight the everyday presence of Racial Discrimination in ways not always acknowledged.
Research on what clinicians call race-based traumatic stress documents this: elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, hypervigilance in professional settings, avoidance of social situations that should feel safe. These are not metaphors. They are measurable physiological changes produced by chronic social stressors, and they do not require a cross burning to occur.
They require a colonel who is surprised you can put sentences together.
What makes this harder to address is that the people it hurts most often don’t have the language for it. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the language that exists comes preloaded with a disclaimer: you have to first argue that what happened to you counts. Before you can get to the wound, you have to prove the cut is deep enough. That cost is its own injury. For many, Racial Discrimination is often dismissed or minimized, making the harm linger longer.
I didn’t tell my wife what the colonel said until three days later, when she asked why I seemed off. I didn’t tell her because I was still deciding whether it counted. That’s the sentence I want you to hold: I was still deciding whether it counted. Not that old, but a senior NCO, over ten years in service, and I was sitting alone with a comment that didn’t rise to the level of incident, trying to figure out if I was allowed to feel it.
The mental health system is not well built for this. Culturally competent care, when it exists at all, is still often unavailable for people who can’t pay out-of-pocket or take a half day off work to get to an appointment. The result is that the people most exposed to these stressors are the people least likely to have somewhere to take them.
Community is what fills that gap, and it fills it imperfectly. The barbershop. The church. The neighborhood watch meeting that turns into a three-hour conversation about what happened to your cousin. These are not clinical settings, but they do something clinical settings struggle to do: they tell you that what you experienced was real, that you are not inventing it, and that other people’s nervous systems have been through the same scanner.
That validation is not a replacement for treatment. But it is the difference between carrying something alone and knowing the weight is shared.
I am not a clinician. What I am is a person who spent 23 years in a uniform, came home, and spent the next decade trying to understand why rooms I was supposed to feel safe in still made me keep track of the exits. Some of that is combat. Some of it is something else.
You learn, eventually, to tell them apart. The combat-trained hypervigilance and the social hypervigilance are close relatives. They speak the same body language. Both of them are exhausting. Only one of them is supposed to go away.
The colonel probably doesn’t remember what he said. That’s the other thing about the small ones.
Today is Juneteenth. June 19, 2026. One hundred and sixty-one years since Union soldiers rode into Galveston and told the last enslaved people in Confederate Texas that the war was over. We made it a federal holiday five years ago.
This year, the administration that manages the National Park Service removed Juneteenth from the free-entry calendar and replaced it with Flag Day, which also happens to be the president’s birthday. Some cities scaled back or canceled their Juneteenth celebrations outright after corporate sponsors pulled funding, DEI offices dissolved, and arts grants disappeared.
Legal experts are clear that a president cannot revoke a federal holiday . Congress made Juneteenth, and Congress would have to unmake it. So the holiday stands. What that tells you is not that the fight is over. It tells you exactly where we are: freedom on the books, erosion in practice, and a government that will let you keep the day off as long as it doesn’t have to pay to honor what the day means. Clearly, ongoing Racial Discrimination can be observed not just on a personal level but also across national events and systems.
The colonel from 1998 is still in the room. He’s just been promoted. I am educated, well-spoken, able to code-switch and still black.
If you want to see how these pressures fit into a larger picture, I pulled everything together in a complete guide to Black mental health that walks through healing, resources, and breaking the stigma.
If this piece landed with you, the conversation doesn’t stop here.
The Unseen March is my field guide to managing PTSD for veterans, first responders, and trauma survivors. It was written for the people who, like me, spent years not knowing what to call what was happening inside them. If you know someone carrying that weight, or if you’re carrying it yourself, the book is a place to start.
Big Sarge writes about veteran mental health, race, and what both communities deserve to hear. New posts drop when the work is ready.
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