Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing is a 2005 theoretical work by Joy DeGruy Leary.

[2] This is summed up in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome as: Multigenerational trauma together with continued oppression and absence of opportunity to access the benefits available in the society.

It manifests as a psychological, spiritual, emotional, and behavioral syndrome that results in a lack of self-esteem, persistent feelings of anger, and internalized racist beliefs.

[4] DeGruy states that PTSS is not a disorder that can be treated and remedied clinically but instead requires profound social change in individuals, as well as in institutions, that continue to reify inequality and injustice toward the descendants of enslaved Africans.

[6][independent source needed] In addition to forming the basis of public lectures and workshops offered by DeGruy and her contemporaries, the research described in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome inspired an eponymous play, staged at the Henry Street Settlement Experimental Theater in 2001.