![]() Similar to Walker’s framework for how abused children are forced to bypass fight, flee, or freeze strategies, the white power structure limited the ability of POC to use fight, flee, and freeze strategies to navigate racial violence, racist laws, and exploitative labor practices. Until the 1960s, white mobs were given impunity to terrorize, attack, and even lynch any POC whom they felt needed to be taught a lesson or made an example of without fear of prosecution. Whites in power segregated the POC into dilapidated housing quarters, restricted their movement, and excluded them from whites-only churches, schools, hospitals, and social spaces. In most cases, white bosses abused and exploited these immigrant laborers similarly to how Southern plantation owners treated former slaves. Hawaii’s sugar plantations and California’s agricultural industry were originally built by laborers recruited from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. For instance, the Central Pacific Railroad at one point had about 12,000 Chinese laborers work on constructing the transcontinental railroad, making up 80% of its workforce. Once slavery was abolished, business owners ramped up the recruitment of migrants from Asia to fill labor shortages. The African slave trade was the primary source of cheap labor for the American South up through the end of the Civil War. ![]() I also believe understanding the fawn response is still relevant to POC today as we process the historical traumas of our ancestors and predecessors while we grow up, go to school, build careers, and raise families in an era when institutions led by white people have the power to act as gatekeepers that determine where we can rent or buy homes, what schools we can go to, what jobs we can get, how much we get paid, whether we advance through promotions, and how much capital we can access to buy real estate or build businesses.Īs a general historical pattern, POC came to America, voluntarily or involuntarily, to fill a need for cheap labor in agriculture, factories, and railroad construction. I believe the fawn response is very important to understanding the strategies available to earlier generations of people of color (POC) to survive the traumas and dangers of living in a white supremacist society that for hundreds of years gave white people free rein to seize POC land, vandalize their property, enslave or exploit their labor, abuse and lynch their bodies, and degrade their dignity. Therefore, as an alternative survival strategy, the abused child “learns to fawn her way into the relative safety of becoming helpful.” The fawn response and POC ![]() even more danger-laden.” Freeze strategies involve numbing and dissociation to cope with the abuse, but do not actually provide any protection from abuse. He also shared that for many children, “the ultimate flight response, running away from home, is hopelessly impractical and. Walker also explains that the child learns that “her natural flight response exacerbates the danger” when the abuser says, ”I’ll teach you to run away from me!” and lashes out violently. (Sadly, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for ‘talking back,’ and hence ruthlessly extinguish the fight response in the child.)” Walker explained, “protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation, and so relinquishes the fight response, deleting ‘no’ from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness. In a 2003 article, Walker explained that the fawn response develops when an abused child learns that fight and flee strategies escalate the abuse, and freeze strategies don’t offer any safety. Walker chose this name based on the definition of the word “fawn” from Webster’s dictionary: “to act servilely cringe and flatter.” How the fawn response develops This 4th strategy involved proactively appeasing the abuser by being useful and helpful in order to gain a modicum of safety. A therapist named Pete Walker originally coined the term “fawn response” to describe a pattern he observed in how his patients coped with childhood abuse that didn’t fit into the fight-flight-freeze model.
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