Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome impacts the generations of African Americans from slavery, affecting the behaviors of African Americans throughout the United States, a renowned researcher and author told a packed crowd on March 5.

Dr. Joy DeGruy, author of two books, focuses on how slavery has a more long-term effect than most people think, resulting in a reluctance to talk about the past and a desire to pretend it didn’t happen.

DeGruy uses the term cognitive dissonance to explain how America has chosen to ignore the history of enslavement and to keep people of today ignorant of their pasts, such as African Americans and people of color.

“Why is it we get so much push-back about slavery?” DeGruy asked.

DeGruy has directed her studies on the “survival instincts” of African Americans and how slavery had caused multi-generational trauma, which is not a new subject for other parts of the world as well.

Examples of new forms of slavery that have occurred legally include the disenfranchising African Americans through through share cropping and Jim Crow Laws. As mentioned frequently throughout her speech, it has become second nature for African Americans and people of color to accept those limitations because of fear and post traumatic slave syndrome.

Nathan Jones, professor of English, voiced that he is satisfied about how everything turned out. He encourages student to come to see Skyline’s guest speakers.

“Being part of the speaker series, we wanted to get some people who are kind of tie into the philosophy here, and the global education, the idea of social justice,” Jones said. “And I think in turns to being able to heal our global community, in regards to understanding the slave mind and how enslavement has traumatized people of African descent and people of color.”

“It was amazing,” said Maurjani Jones (no relation to Professor Nathan Jones), a Cañada student majoring in Political science, “It amazed me how many people don’t know these things, including black people.”

Jones did talk about how the diversity of the group who came to the speech was the biggest thing, knowing that everybody was being educated.

As a last comment for Skyline, DeGruy believes young people today should should acknowledge history if they want to make a difference.

“I don’t care if you’re a farmer, make certain that equity and justice is happening. It’s the system planning in classes in your work, that‘s how change happens. I’m passing the baton” said DeGruy.

Update: the cutline for the photo was changed. 11:07 a.m. 3/13/2015
Update: the article was replaced with the latest version to fix an error. 12:32 p.m. 3/16/2015