Blacks have “a history of our fortitude being tested”, a packed hall heard last night from visiting lecturer Kenneth Hardy.

“Keep going,” was his advice.

A professor of family therapy from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Dr Hardy heads home today after hosting workshops on racial trauma and young people that culminated in an interactive lecture that brought about 160 people into the Anglican Cathedral’s hall.

His words went to a black woman whose son was soon to head to a college that he had been told not to bother applying for.

“He was not accepted because of his darker hue,” the woman said, wondering if her son would “still be able to ignore people who tell him no, before he even walks in the door”.

Racial trauma was like oxygen, Dr Hardy said: “We can’t see or touch it, but we know for sure it’s in the room.”

He likened its legacy down generations to that of alcoholism or chronic disease, with a focus on children of colour — and the need for adults to affirm their inner worth.

Tracing slavery’s effects across generations in his own family, Dr Hardy, who came to the island at the behest of the charity Family Centre, called it “foolhardy” to maintain that they did not persist.

While black and white people were socialised to look at their racial status and “extract a very different meaning”, Dr Hardy said that “most whites are racially socialised but don’t know it”, while people of colour found that “the world has very abrupt ways of reminding you”, should they attempt to ignore it.

“One thing we are taught is to not talk about race,” he said. “I’m always fascinated watching us interact across racial lines.”

Blacks feared discussing race around whites, he added, adopting “coded ways of talking about it”.

“It sends incredibly confusing messages to our young people. We see it, but we deny it.

“It’s crazy, and we wonder why are children are symptomatic.”

He recalled a session in which he had spotted a 45-year-old black participant carefully removing watermelon from his fruit bowl because he could not bring himself to eat it in front of white people, after relentless racist teasing in his Alabama childhood.

“Each of us has our own version of the watermelon story,” Dr Hardy said — challenging his audience to confront their issues and “become a new self”.