‘Chronic exposure’

Role models set example for white kids to fight, or accept, racism

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down.

Yin and yang. E=mc 2. However you say it, the point remains the same. Elements in our natural world do not function in isolation.

Here in Hamden, police carrying lethal weapons are stationed in our middle and high schools, and some advocate expanding their presence to elementary schools.

Unsurprisingly, black students in these same schools were suspended during the 2018-19 school year at nearly five times the rate of white students (16.2 percent vs. 3.4 percent, respectively).

I could write about the mental health consequences of intergenerational trauma, racism and incarceration on black kids. I can also write about the long-term psychiatric effects of black children personally experiencing, directly witnessing or reasonably fearing police brutality, both inside and outside schools.

Yet, I could not fathom writing one more piece, one more descriptor of disparities, about the negative effects of police brutality and racism on black children.

If there are two sides to every equation, why are we always discussing police brutality and systematic racism from an isolated perspective of its victims, on black children and adults?

Let’s talk about the attitudes of the student bystanders witnessing their black peers receive unjust physical and educational reprimand. Let’s talk about the psyche of children who will grow up to be the next social justice ally versus complicit supporter of systems of oppression.

Today, we are talking about the effects on police injustice on the frequently overlooked other half of the equation: white kids.

Given that their half of the equation does not risk being murdered, the psychological impact of police brutality on white children is largely determined by the explanations and viewpoints expressed by their role models.

These values may be passed on explicitly, like the many amazing white parents across the nation educating their children about antiracism and legacies of white supremacy.

These children inherit the mindset to stand against the discrimination of their black classmates. To the contrary, some white families openly promote police enforcement to maintain “law and order,” without teaching children to critically examine whether these laws are fair or fairly executed. These are the families teaching white children, “No one would have been hurt if they [black kids] had just obeyed the rules or behaved like this instead of that [assumedly, like white kids].”

This process of selecting loosely related reasons to justify why black children deserve aggressive police intervention is called rationalization in psychology. Rationalizing violence against black children and adults creates a dangerous mentality for white children who grow up to become the next police officer.

Perhaps most frequently, values about injustice are passed to white children without their role models ever engaging them in dialogue one way or another.

In these cases, white children’s attitudes may greatly be shaped by chronic exposure and habituation to violence against black peers. Simply put, habituation is the process whereby a new or alarming event loses its shock value after someone is exposed to this same event over and over again. Many already examine the long-term developmental consequences of early exposure to police violence and racism experienced by black children. Yet, there are two sides to every story. The psychological coping reactions of white children exposed to brutality against their black classmates set the trajectory for whether they become the next antiracism ally, non-intervening bystander, complicit supporter, or active perpetrator of this same injustice.