A Different Way to See Harm
Most frameworks rank harm like a stack. We map it as a relationship instead, from the systems a person inherits to what their body carries today.
Five Ways We Reframe Harm
-
Colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism are the harm. Identity is what these systems act on, not what causes the damage. That distinction keeps responsibility where it belongs.
-
A private stereotype is harmful on its own. Combined with authority over someone’s salary, healthcare, or safety, it becomes institutional harm — and that’s where organizations can actually intervene.
-
Institutions create conditions. People adapt to survive them, and those adaptations can get reproduced between people navigating the same system. Understanding where a behavior came from doesn’t remove accountability for what it does.
-
Research on long-term stress that includes racial battle fatigue and other oppressive weatherings shows that these chronic stresses compound physically over time: hypervigilance, disrupted sleep, exhaustion, burnout. Organizations measure turnover. They rarely ask who has migraines every Monday.
-
A person walking into your organization carries personal, family, and community history, and for many, the layered weight of historical and colonial policy. Institutions inherit history. So do people.
Grounded in Research
Grounded in Phelan & Link’s fundamental-cause theory, Smith et al. on racial battle fatigue, Geronimus et al. on weathering, Brave Heart on historical trauma, Indigenous social-determinants scholarship, Indigenous relational-wellness research, and intersectional and decolonial scholarship on overlapping harm, alongside our own original synthesis. This same model also shapes our organizational work, and it’s becoming the foundation for a new leadership and healing training.