Traumatic Influences of MENA Americans

The three macrolevel factors related to cumulative trauma are historical trauma, national context, and institional discrimination. Historical trauma is defined as experiencing trauma from your country of origin whether that be opression, torture, war/violence etc. National context is seen as a group who experiences scrutiny in a hostile environement. An example used in the article is after 9/11 when those of Muslim heritage where seen as terrorists due to the bad potrayal from the media. Institutional discrimination is the enaction of discrimination through institutions of society. The article brings up the US PATRIOT Act which gave the government powers to spy on anyone they deemed suspicious in order to prevent further terrorism. Looking further we see that many MENA Americans were targeted by this hasty act and had their privacy invaded due to their ethnicity. When it comes to microlevels factors the two factors identified are interpersonal discrimination and microagressions. When it comes to the outcomes of trauma, the effect it has is severe. Mentally, many experience this lingering sense of hopelessness and dispare due to the shock of trying to get acclimated to the new life they are trying to lead while being put through the psycological battle of trauma simultaneously. This then leads to an increase in levels of things such as anxiety, depresssion, and many other dibilitating mental health issues. What makes matters worse is that these traumatic instances happen in every aspect of MENA Americans' lives. Locations such as school, work, and even their own neighborhood are all areas where these startling events can occur and start to wear on these individuals. Looking at the videos and the concepts from the articles in other countries find it very liberating to come to the U.S. and be afforded oppurtunities that they didn't have in their native countries. However, many also find it hard to adapt and even face ridicule just for being foreign born. This essentially shadows all the good that came with moving out of their country and leaves them with this sense of alienation with bieng moved out of their country and not being appreciated there because of their gender,and then arriving somewhere else just to be judged by their race. Of course these aspects of alienation are highlighted exactly from the model and come from experiences such as microagressions and interpersonal discrimination just to name a few.I see resilience from the females in these videos in a lot of ways. One is just the courage it takes to move far from home and lose family members, friends, and that sense of familiarity of both the culture and societal norms that they grew up with. Another example of their resiliency is the adherence to their native culture regardless of the extreme hate that may surround them as they practice their culture. Even with all the hardships of moving these girls still make a concerted effort to adapt to the new culture around them and take everyday in stride with a smile on their faces regardless of how tough things become.I do not believe that we have experienced a scenario in which it is justified to restrict an ban a single group of people from coming into our country. However, maybe in the distant future when our planet becomes more overpopulated there may be justification for saying that a country is too densely populated and cannot take anyone in period. Whne it comes to specific groups it becomes very difficult justifying the barring of a single nationality of people from a country.

News, N. B. C. (2021). Muslim Americans still facing discrimination 20 years after 9/11. NBCNews.com. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/muslim-americans-still-facing-discrimination-20-years-911-rcna1915

Padela, A. I., & Heisler, M. (2010, February). The Association of Perceived Abuse and discrimination after September 11, 2001, with psychological distress, level of happiness, and health status among Arab Americans. American journal of public health. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2804633/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final Blog Post

Image
I chose my topic because I have family that work in the hospital and after talking about wealth disparities in class it made me realize that one medical incident could easily drive an impoverished family into ruin. After looking at a few articles it became obvious that many people of color experienced the problem of lacking healthcare than white people. I decided that to reach my target audience I would inform them of the growing expansion of ACA medicaid available for those who do not have health insurance. Although I sent both authors of the article my factsheet I did not get a response from either of them. Therefore I got no feedback when it came to interpretting and using their article in my project. I only shared my materials on my blog for a handful of reasons. The main reason being that since I didn't get any input from the authors about the article of theirs I am unsure whether the information I used was properly applied. Also, I found it difficult to format my post in a wa...
Read more

Culture and Socialization

     This week I want to talk about some difficulties that mixed people like myself have. My background is Mexican and American (specifically German) and growing up mixed almost feels as if picking sides in a sense. Referring specifically to the iceberg analogy in our textbook, (Sensoy and DiAngelo pp.37) you can see that there are parts in the "underside" of the iceberg that are "unspoken" and "unconscious" which acts as muscle memory for some. However, I have run across instances where these rules contradict each other across cultures. An instance of this occurring was when I went to meet my mom's side of the family in Nashville Tennessee and went out for dinner. Afterwards my mom had to explain to me that she was taught growing up that talking across the table was considered rude and said that I needed to be more conscious of my elders around me. While growing up we rarely met with my mom's side of the family (Mexican) and spent more time with m...
Read more

White Privilege

White privilege and educational inequality are related because with whiteness comes the privileges of things such as a better school, resources, etc. This isn't to say that these resources are not available in some capacity to colored people because more white people find themselves in private or charter schools. These same resources are sparsely scattered due to the majority of colored children finding themselves in public schools with little funding to afford such luxuries. Specific benefits that white people have in the education system are nicer school systems in general. Whether that be better books, transportation, or connections to people that can get their children help if they start to fall behind. It is because of these highlighted differences that affirmative action has become a factor at many schools. It serves as a tool to allow colored students an opportunity of having these resources at hand that white kids have always had. The reason that many people think ill of th...
Read more