Suicide is not just a white calamity

It was once so easy for me to believe that suicide was a white thing, that it was not a calamity about which black people need worry themselves. Like many people I grew up with, we were sure that was one area of black exceptionalism. Indeed, even now, official statistics indicate that the rate of suicide among blacks and Hispanics is lower than it is for Native Americans, whites and Asian Americans, in that order.

But just as too much experience eventually disabused blacks of the notion that AIDS was a gay, white, male phenomenon, so, too, should experience awaken us to the fact that a whole lot more black people are victims of suicide than are being tracked by statisticians.

“It doesn’t matter if the African American is in the inner city, where survival is day to day, or in the suburbs, where survival may be week to week,” says psychologist Janice Stevenson, who notes that depression, anxiety and trauma are on the rise among African Americans.

“We live in a society where — especially in the last few years we are seen as disposable,” she said. “Despair leads us to a point of hopelessness, powerlessness and helplessness and a feeling that there is no need to see tomorrow.”

When we pull back the curtains, suicide

The dramatic end of the hope that the Obama administration teased us with for eight years has also done a number on the psyche of black Americans.