We don't need another conversation about race, says Joy Leary-DeGruy. We don't need another study, and we don't need another sentimental "We Are the World" moment. What we need, she says, is an honest conversation about race and we need to change.

"If we don't do it, I'm telling you right now, we're going to have a hot mess in America," Leary-DeGruy says.

Statements like that make some people lean forward with interest, she says, and cause others to squirm in their seats.

Leary-DeGruy is among a respected group of African-American researchers and writers in the post-Civil Rights era re-examining slavery, racism, and African-American culture.

Leary-DeGruy's book "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing," has resonated with readers across racial lines. While informative and sharp in its analysis, PTSS is not an easy read. It is an uncompromising look at slavery through the lens of a sociologist.

Contemporary African Americans are often psychologically enslaved by the physical chains that bound their ancestors, Leary-DeGruy says. The horrors of slavery were so terrible for so long, she says, that the trauma was, and continues to be, passed from one generation to the next.

"Today, the legacy of slavery remains etched in our souls," Leary-DeGruy writes in PTSS. "Understanding the role our past plays in our present attitudes, outlooks, mindsets, and circumstances is important if we are to free ourselves from the spiritual, mental, and emotional shackles that bind us today."

Societal healing, she says, requires a frank conversation about the American slavery period, which in her words means "pulling the covers off everyone."

Leary-DeGruy earned her doctorate in social work from Portland State University, and she holds master's degrees in social work and clinical psychology. She was the keynote speaker at "Exploring the Socio-cultural Trauma and Stigma of the Urban Community," a two-day conference held in Rochester on Friday, October 30, and Saturday, October 31.

In an interview prior to the conference, Leary-DeGruy discussed her PTSS theory, reactions to her book, and the lingering effects of slavery on contemporary America.

The following is an edited version of that interview.

Why did you title your book "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome?" PTS usually refers to psychological trauma. And it isn't typically viewed as a generational disorder, is it?

My background is in mental health, and I have spent much of my career looking at mental and emotional issues. When I studied PTS, what fascinated me most was that a person can be diagnosed with PTS as a result of a single trauma. And not only that, they can experience trauma indirectly. They can hear about something happening to a loved one and be traumatized to such a degree that they require assistance.

I looked at that construct and thought O.K., if a person can conceivably be diagnosed with a stress-related mental illness by having heard about a trauma, what in the world must have occurred with people who not only experienced trauma directly, but those who experienced the trauma of all those around them? And this traumatic episode occurred over centuries. So what people have to understand when I say "post traumatic" is that I'm giving you an etiology of some of the things we passed along from generation to generation.

When you look at the symptoms of PTS, you're looking at hyper-vigilance, outbursts of anger, difficulties going to sleep and waking up a lot, thoughts of a foreshortened future, and it goes on and on. Now just imagine the people living in those environments with people with those symptoms. After a while, with it never being diagnosed, never being treated, and never given a chance to heal, what you have is a culture with broken behaviors.

Explain how this impacts individuals, families, and whole communities.

Let's say mom, dad, and the folks in my slave community all have these symptoms. Maybe I don't have PTS. Maybe I'm just there. But I am then by virtue of being in this social environment learning the behaviors even if I haven't been directly injured.

After slavery ended, there was still trauma. There was never a period of healing, ever. There was never a period of O.K., let's look at the impact, the harm that this has done.

We see vestiges of that in everything we eat, everything we believe in about who and what we are, internalized fear and self-loathing for one's culture, and for what is African.

And this is true all the way up to the present. You have Chris Rock who just created a movie on good hair. What I tell my audience when I speak is that the mere fact he had to make a movie about it is an indication of the injury.

How was this able to survive for so many generations after slavery ended? And what is enabling this to impact young people today?

We need to recognize that the oppression, while it has changed, it still is very much present. We can cite the data: the health and education disparities. However you want to look at it, black folks are usually at the tip top of those disparities. That's the outer society that continues the oppression in the institutionalized racism that still exists.

But then we also have the internalized stuff that has been passed on within the culture. If you begin to interpret the behaviors - what we eat, what we believe it means to have light skin or dark skin - whatever value we place on those things, and we don't question, we pass on to our children.

It's very easy; it's vicarious learning in your environment, what you believe about whom and what you are. And that is passed on from generation to generation.

Clearly, we are resilient. But when you fold it into what we call our culture, some of those behaviors are extremely negative, extremely damaging. But no one knew, no one questioned it. People just said "This is our culture."

Well, African Americans, just like other cultures, can ill-afford to swallow it whole. What we call culture has too much of what I call poison in the cookies. There's so much folded into that, and it's not always good.

That's true of anybody's culture. But it's particularly the case in African-American culture because there is so much adaptive stuff that we had going on in order to survive. It made sense once, it doesn't make sense now. It has metastasized into some crazy thinking about whom and what you have to be - hence, good hair.

You've said that Americans can talk about the Holocaust and about how the Japanese were held in camps during World War II, but we can't talk about slavery. Why?

One of the things that I discovered in my work is that to uncover and unmask all of the horrors of enslavement, if we were to really do that, it also pulls the covers off white behavior, white culture, and white values. We pull the covers off of everyone when we do that.

If you were to look at what is being unmasked, there is a history that we've all denied. Think about being whoever you are: a white person growing up in America, a country that is this noble, kind, loving, civilized leader of the world. And then you uncover some truths about the barbaric behavior that went on for hundreds of years. It's inconceivable.

And there are folks that are not ready for Timmy and Jimmy to know about this because, oh my goodness, we're the noble ones. But when you uncover enslavement, and you look at this behavior and the things that were done - you've got to be horrified.

So, the first thing in the pushback against slavery is denial. What has happened as it relates to slavery in America is that we've never looked. We bought whatever the two pages say in our history books, and we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.

Let me give you an example. I went to Ghana recently. I had no idea about the numbers of people who died on their way to North America. They told me how long people were held in the slave castles, how long it took them to get over here, and the numbers who died en route. We're talking about something that is integral to my history as a person of African-American descent.

When you talk about this, what kind of a reaction do you get from white people?

It's very, very interesting. I am in Wisconsin at Blackhawk Technical College at the annual Absence of Color Conference. These are educators and administrators, and we've been talking about racism, equitable distribution of resources, and disparity in the achievement gap. The majority of the people in this setting are white. They come, they get it.

Over the years, I've watched it get easier for white people to stay in the room. It's very hard for white people to stay in the room, because it gets so intense. It pushes against everything for them culturally. It feels confrontational. It feels like they are being blamed, and they feel guilty.

Those of us doing race and social justice work are way beyond trying to blame people or make people feel guilty. The agenda is how do we correct, heal, and make better.

But those people who walk in at a 101 level - you know, do you really think there still is racism, that kind of thing - those people, of course, are devastated. They are so devastated that they don't know what to do with themselves.

Do you think that they, in turn, could be experiencing PTSS?

I think they suffer from something different. What are the residual impacts of unearned privilege? What happens to a person through generations of unearned privilege? Denial is huge on the list. A lack of empathy is huge on the list. Fear. Anger.

Enslavement was done for a European culture. So I think what happened to white people is that it has been trapped inside emotionally. It's like a secret. It's the secret that no one can discuss.

Why was there so much disagreement over what we were seeing during Hurricane Katrina?

People were asking: "Is this racism? Is this about class?" But you make my point. When you are watching people suffering, you don't intellectualize about how or why they are suffering. You just help them. And where we got lost in America was asking each other, "What am I looking at?"

There is a caption from Associated Press that I've used in my presentations. It was a split caption. The first is of a black man with a big plastic bag. The caption reads, "Man wades through chest-deep flood water after looting a local grocery store."

The bottom half shows two white people doing exactly the same thing. But the caption reads, "Two residents wade through six feet of water after finding bread and water at a local grocery store."

Slavery exists throughout human history, and still exists today. What does that say about us as human beings, and what is different about the American experience with slavery?

The difference in the enslavement of Africans is that they were dehumanized. That's what made this period of enslavement different; it permanently placed an entire group of people in a position of being less than human.

Then you see all of the other things that continued to enforce that belief - black people were biologically and genetically pre-disposed to be inferior, medical experimentation, preventing education, the white man's burden - these were all concepts that the white man used to permanently justify placing people with black skin into a sub-human category. And that was what led to the destruction of the integrity and the dignity of white people, as well as black people.

It doesn't surprise me that there is such pushback, confusion, and ambivalence surrounding the discussion of slavery. It's like finally lancing the boil. And it's painful for everybody, but it's the only way we can heal.

It seemed like the country was on the verge of a national healing in the 1970's after the riots, the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King. But at least here in Rochester, our city schools are more segregated than ever. What happened?

We bought an illusion of equity, of inclusion, of parity, of justice, and guess what? It never happened.

We've seen the disparity grow even wider. A lot of us dropped the baton. We had those who were seeking to be middle class, and they forgot about our community, and we lost our communities. We lost our neighborhoods. We lost economic standing.

Here's what exacerbates it: You have a generation of young people across the board that is being taught you are what you have. Get yours. It's all about the individual, and the self-centered, insatiable appetite. I want more, bigger, brighter, and I don't care who I have to step on to get it. Reality TV is a perfect example of that: I will humiliate myself, my family, everything, if the price is right. I will wallow in it, lie, cheat, denigrate myself - and everybody applauds it.

Your critics argue that this is just another excuse to be the victim, and to not take personal responsibility. I'm referring to people like journalist Juan Williams and Bill Cosby, who have taken a lot of criticism for promoting personal responsibility.

Bill Cosby and I are in agreement about a lot of stuff. I am more of a mind about people having efficacy themselves, and not becoming victims. This is about you understanding your behavior so that you by yourself can change your behavior.

A lot of young people today have no clue about anybody who did anything for them. They have no clue about their history. Hence, they don't know who they are, and they are behaving outside what is appropriate.

We have African Americans who have achieved iconic success. We have an African-American president. Does that mean that they have been healed of PTSS?

Here's the reality: Black people are as diverse as any group of people. Very often people will say that we don't have any racial problems; we've got a black president. Or they'll say, "What about Oprah?" And I say, what about her?

For some reason, it always comes down to this. People will say: "Joy, how do you explain that there are black people who don't have knowledge of this and seem to do well?" And I say, well, good for them. They do exist. It's not either-or, it's and.