What's the harm? Internalized prejudice and cultural betrayal trauma in ethnic minorities

The differential contexts that ethnic minorities face as a result of lower societal status impact outcomes of trauma. Cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT) is a contextualized framework that was created to examine trauma in minority populations. According to CBTT, due to societal inequality, within-group trauma in minority populations is a cultural betrayal that contributes to outcomes. In addition to looking at typically studied abuse outcomes (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder), CBTT also predicts cultural outcomes, such as internalized prejudice, changes in ethnic identity, and (intra)cultural pressure (e.g., silencing victims of intraracial trauma to protect the minority ingroup from discriminatory individuals and systems of the dominant culture). No prior studies have examined cultural outcomes in CBTT. It was hypothesized that intraracial trauma (aka, cultural betrayal trauma) would be associated with cultural outcomes in a sample of ethnic minority college students. Participants (N = 296; 60.5% female; age: M = 20.12, SD = 2.81) were ethnic minority college students (35.0% Asian, 24.7% Hispanic-Latino American, 14.2% Other, 13.2% Black-African American, 5.7% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, 3.4% American Indian-Alaska Native, and 3.4% Middle Eastern) attending a predominantly White university. Participants completed self-report questionnaires assessing trauma and outcomes online. Separate hierarchical linear regression analyses suggested that when controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and interracial trauma, intraracial trauma predicted internalized prejudice, (intra)cultural pressure, and changes in identification with ethnic identity. These findings have implications for cultural competency in clinical interventions for minority victims of trauma. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).