experiences to properly understand the history of violence and abuse committed by a

dominant society against groups of disenfranchised and disempowered people and to

examine the full psychological impact of trauma on these people's lives. When a society

singles out and persecutes groups, the "designated victims" (Robert Jay Lifton) or

"targeted groups" (Kali Tal) become the psychological capital upon which the dominant

group lives.43 As Lifton maintains in reference to Jews in Nazi Germany and Blacks in

America, these victims are the "people off whom we live not only economically ... but

psychologically" because "we reassert our own vitality and symbolic immortality by

denying them their right to live and by identifying them with the death taint, by

designating them as victims."44

 The long-term effects of oppression and its psychological impact can be understood

in terms of the feminist psychotherapist Maria P. P. Root's concept of "insidious trauma."

Root explains the specific traumatogenic effects of oppression and broadens the limited

concept of trauma as individual distress to include the communal experiences of women,

children, and minority groups who have been neglected in the development of theory.

This concept of insidious trauma is helpful in understanding the psychological plight of

the socially disempowered. As Root explains, insidious trauma is "usually associated

with the social status of an individual being devalued because a characteristic intrinsic to

their identity is different from what is valued by those in power" and illustrates how this

kind of experience indirectly but insidiously becomes a "distinct threat to psychological

safety, security, or survival."45 For many victims of social injustice, trauma is a

communal problem that plagues them insidiously, and its relationship to social

oppression is undeniable. As Kai Erikson notes, trauma precipitates "a constellation of