On Racial Trauma and Getting Scolded by my Daughter's Daycare Teacher

“People sometimes ask me how I deal with racism, and I often respond that I just unambiguously outperform all the White people that I have to compete with (...) that strategy has worked well for me so far, but it’s hard to explain the immense, grinding pressure of always having to be clearly, unambiguously, perfectly good, or risk being judged, even without evidence at all, as unqualified, guilty and bad". (Keon West, The Science of Racism, 2025)

A few days ago I got ‘scolded’ by my daughter’s daycare teacher for the fact that she had been dropped off late a few times this month and it unexpectedly triggered me quite strongly. As a side note, my husband does drop off 95% of the time so there’s probably a certain gender dynamic at play in why she felt that I was the parent to have this conversation with.    Although the interaction was pretty harmless, I felt my body tense up and it affected my mood for a good part of the day. It took me a moment to understand why such a minor interaction had caused this response. After some thought, I realised that my reaction was most likely rooted in racial trauma. 

As a black woman existing in the world as it is, I realised and internalised early on that I don’t have a margin of error. I don’t feel like I am allowed to make any small ‘mistakes’ or take any action that could be perceived as such because I know in the back of my mind that I will not be given grace. I have internalised that I always have to be clearly, unambiguously, perfectly good. Anything else can and will often be perceived as a personal failure which confirms that you weren’t meant to be here all along.

Through this blog post, I want to provide a few reflections on racial trauma, how it has affected me and how I want to tackle this going forward. Feel free to reach out to me or leave a comment if this resonates with you.

What is Racial Trauma ?

Racial Trauma is defined as “the cumulative impact of race-based traumatic experiences at individual, institutional, and systemic levels”. Although similar to Posttraumatic stress disorder, racial trauma is unique in that it involves ongoing individual and collective injuries due to exposure and re-exposure to race-based stress.

In my case, the conversation with my daughter’s daycare teacher triggered a stress response from me which wasn’t so much about the conversation itself but how my body received it in a context in which I am one of few black women in my institution (to which the daycare center is affiliated to) and my daughter is the only black child in the daycare.

My stress response here related to a specific incident which happened in High School. Back then, I was preparing for the entrance exam to Sciences Po Paris through the Convention d’Education Prioritaire programme and was following an extracurricular weekly workshop at my high school in that context. For background, my high school was located in Clichy-Sous-Bois, one of the most marginalised Banlieus near Paris. This means that young people from this high school weren’t the ones who usually made it to a school like Sciences Po. The teacher in charge of the workshop - a white woman -  had a distinctive way of reminding us - young people of the global majority from lower socio-economic backgrounds -  through regular remarks and reflexions that we indeed weren’t the demographic which usually made it into Sciences Po and that we should be grateful to her for taking on this workshop.

I didn’t have the concepts or words to understand it back then but thinking back to it, I realise that there was probably a sense of white saviourism and maybe a superiority complex at play. This teacher’s way of communicating so as to make students feel small irritated me greatly. Not knowing that one should never be too honest through e-mail back then, I made a remark highlighting why her constant passive-aggressive remarks were problematic through an e-mail response. Was I perhaps a little impertinent? Maybe. However, I didn’t insult her or cross any line that warranted what came next. The teacher brought up the e-mail to the head of school and demanded that I be punished. The institution and teachers rallied behind her and suddenly I had an “attitude problem” and was stripped of my “Félicitations” (an accolade for students with high grades in the French system which counts for university applications) although I was the top student of my class.

What stays with me till this day is that no one ever asked me my version of the story. Not the head of the school, not my principal teacher or other teachers that I thought I had a good relationship with. Some of them later pulled me aside, saying that they were ‘shocked by the outcome” and the proportions this incident took when it wasn’t anything serious. But they found their voices when it no longer mattered. When it counted, when I needed someone to take a stand and say ‘wait, let’s hear her side’, they stayed silent. I was a good student, top of my class, always well behaved, always played by the rules. In my naive teenager brain, I thought that it would mean that I would at least be given the opportunity to tell my side of the story. However, it wasn’t the case. No one gave me the benefit of the doubt or was interested in hearing what I had to say. My behaviour had deviated from what was expected and I needed to be punished for it.

What I didn’t realize then but is very clear to me now is that this was never about the email per se. It was about humbling me. About showing me my place. It was, honestly, pettiness dressed up as discipline. This was later confirmed by the fact that the same teacher wrote on my report card  “she really needs to learn humility, otherwise she’s never going to succeed in life.” I made it this far. Joke’s on her, I guess.

This made me understand that as a black woman, playing by the rules doesn’t guarantee you grace. Excellence doesn’t buy you the benefit of the doubt. You can do everything right and when push comes to shove, none of it will matter. You will not be given the opportunity to defend yourself. You will not be believed. You will be judged, discounted, dismissed.

When my daughter’s daycare teacher pointed out that she is often late, my body didn’t hear a gentle reminder to bring her on time. It heard: You’re about to be judged without a hearing. No one will ask for your side. You’re about to be perceived as a problem. Bonus: as the only black family at the daycare, you’re going to confirm for them that black people are always late.

What to do about it?

This is exhausting. This constant tension, the feeling that the other shoe is always about to drop, that as black women, no matter how excellent we are, we will never be protected and when push comes to shove no one will have our back.

This constant stress has been found to be the cause of  various health problems in the long term and can lead to shortened life expectancy for black women. 

I wish I could end this post with a neat five-step solution on how to tackle the effects of racial trauma in our lives but I can’t. This is something I'm still working through. 

What makes it tricky is that it's deeply personal but it's also systemic. The consequences of being perceived as not good enough are real. It can mean losing standing at institutional level, being passed up on professional opportunities, which leads to material losses and further loss of self-esteem. We can't just positive-think our way out of structures that were never designed to give us grace.

I don't have a solution but I do have some thoughts on what might help going forward.

1. Untraining the body: This stress response lives in our nervous systems. It's visceral, instinctive, and it didn't appear overnight—which means it won't disappear overnight either. But we can work, slowly, to teach our bodies that not every remark is a threat to our existence. By practicing this intentionally, we can lessen the impact of these interactions over time on our nervous system.

2. Accepting that you might be wrongly perceived: Once you accept that no amount of excellence will fully protect you from being misread, dismissed, or punished; something shifts. Not into hopelessness, but into a kind of release. You stop gripping so tightly to a bargain that was never honored and instead focus on living authentically based on what makes you feel that you are living a life which honours your needs.  

3. Giving yourself grace and permission: Give yourself permission to feel triggered and time to process your feelings. Name the feeling, understand the systems at play.  

Your worth isn’t contingent on being clearly, unambiguously, perfectly good. 

For me, my choice of PhD subject is part of this endeavour of stepping away from being “good” or at least the script of what is expected from someone like me and focus instead on building on the intellectual contributions of my foremothers who were probably deemed as not good enough to re-think a world in which we no longer have to ask ourselves what is the best strategy to stay within the lines of expectations but rather how can we draw a completely different trajectory which honours the uniqueness of our perspectives. 

As Michelle Wallace stated in her essay A Black Feminist Search for Sisterhood, as black women “being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world”. I’m hoping that through walking more authentically in our truths and our purpose, we can also build it anew.

You can read the French version of this post here!