Scholar Info

Joseph Tucker Edmonds

Religious Studies, Africana Studies, Center for Africana Studies and Culture, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
ude[dot]iupui[at]erekcutj

Narrating and Evaluating Black Male Cultural Trauma

After years of studying the relationship between Black religious organizations and communities' responses to cultural and political upheaval, I decided that I wanted to more specifically address the impact of cultural and political upheaval on everyday Black men and not focus so heavily on the leaders of community and activist organizations. This turn to everyday Black men's experiences required a retooling of my methodological interventions and shifted my relationship to community partners. Prior to this project, I worked with community partners to have a better understanding of their histories and to use their histories and re-configured archives to plan for future political and cultural programs. With this new project, I am using a qualitative and quantitative approach to narrate and evaluate the impact of cultural trauma on Black men and assess how that cultural trauma impacts their willingness to engage with mental health providers. In collaboration with a colleague from the School of Social Work and a couple of community partners, we endeavored to devise a scale that would measure the impact of cultural trauma and identify areas that could assist in resolving longstanding issues and concerns. This Cultural Trauma Scale (CUTs) was developed by surveying hundreds of Black men on their experiences with racial injustice and cultural trauma and validating this scale in collaboration with experts on race, trauma, and mental health. This scale can now be used to assess and shape clinical care and social services for Black men, and we are now in the process of considering versions of this study and scale for Black women and Black boys.