USA TODAY International Edition
Reparations go beyond righting economic wrongs
Multigenerational trauma needs healing
In the 1980s, a teacher introduced an eager group of students to the rigors of history by stating that slavery was not that big of a deal. Most people, this person said, only had one or two.
Those comments didn’t come from a place of isolation. More than a third of adults don’t know how widespread slavery was in America, according to a 2019 Washington Post- SSRS poll.
As a girl in that Maryland classroom, I was flabbergasted by comments from a person I once admired. It was obvious to me that my teacher’s assessment of slavery ( in addition to being inaccurate) was missing a sense of humanity. America’s 200- plus years of chattel slavery, breeding and mistreatment was inflicted on millions of African Americans.
Today, I analyze that moment as one surrounded by multigenerational trauma. The Black students in that classroom were essentially told our history of struggle didn’t rate in the schema of human tragedy. And that white teacher lacked the empathy to properly inform students about the horrors of one of the worst periods in American history.
The fact that Black emotions don’t get acknowledged – whether hundreds of years ago or in a classroom in the 1980s – is a hard truth in America. So is the revelation that Black people are still psychologically traumatized by slavery. And those scars don’t just appear after new forms of discrimination.
From slavery to police brutality
Dr. Cheryl Grills, a clinical psychologist specializing in Black trauma, says our hypervigilance is a carryover from bondage – reenforced every time we see a video of a police officer killing a Black man on camera. Dr. Joy DeGruy calls these lingering coping mechanisms Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
Congress is taking small steps toward publicly acknowledging the nation’s history of racist oppression. Last month, members heard from victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre. And Juneteenth, which recognizes the end of slavery, became a federal holiday. But as activists tally the economic hardships caused by slavery and racism to push for federal reparations, how do we reconcile the much less visible but no less damaging mental health vestiges that slavery left behind in both Black and white America?
Plenty of slaves documented mental anguish, escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass among them. He described being taken from his grandmother – who provided the only comfort and home he had ever known – when he was not even 7.
DeGruy talks about slave women and girls having been raped much more frequently than most people realize and cites census records that show 600,000 mixed- race kids born in the mid- 1800s.
Charles Ball, sold throughout the midAtlantic, witnessed a beating so severe, the slave was confined to bed. How could that moment not instill a sense of paranoia and paralyzing fear in the slaves who saw or heard about it?
Bodycam footage of police brutality triggers the same fear stressors and responses today, says Grills. And though we now can certainly fight back against brutality in ways that slaves couldn’t, the hypervigilant response persists.
Slaves built America. And slavery was codified by our Constitution. The United States was one of the last countries to abolish it. While other nations were taking steps to mitigate the terrors of the slave system, our Founding Fathers were giving Southern slaveholding states more power by adding a three-fifths clause to the Constitution.
If colonists had to pay for the labor that built America, would we still be one of the richest nations in the world?
The majority of African Americans moved from the trauma of slavery to other traumas like sharecropping, massacres, convict leasing and, today, police brutality and mass incarceration. All these stressors are detrimental to Black physical and mental well- being, and they account, in large part, for many of the adverse health disparities we face today.
DeGruy’s PTSS theory also plays out behaviorally. Black mothers downplaying the accomplishments of their children, she says, originated with slave mothers who feared that a child who was publicly praised as gifted or smart would be taken from her.
Healing psychological trauma and biases supports the progress of everything else. Dr. John Rich, who teaches health management at Drexel University, is making a start. He is the co- director of the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice, which gives young Black men a place to heal from the emotional traumas of racial violence.
Grills and Enola Aird, founder of the Community Healing Network, established emotional emancipation centers, places for Black people all over the world to talk about long- held psychological traumas related to race.
Congress should fund places of psychological and emotional healing modeled after Rich’s emotional trauma centers and Grills’ and Aird’s emancipation hubs all over the country. And the services should be free to both Black and white people trying to work through issues related to race.
Asking for repair is not about placing blame or evoking shame or guilt among white America. Talking about the psychological ramifications of slavery in modern- day society is not an attempt to minimize the progress, capabilities or successes of African Americans.
The conversation surrounding repair is a call for the nation to face the hard truths of our history, look deeply at the role that various institutions, including the federal government, played and find ways to rectify the abuses that caused long- term damage.
Repairing all of America
Slavery didn’t just damage Black people. It damaged white people, too. My teacher’s inability to express empathy for Black suffering wasn’t created in a vacuum. That mentality – whether held by members of Congress, health care professionals, teachers or cops – has to die for our country to make progress that benefits everyone.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee recently talked to me about the importance of H. R. 40 – a bill that calls for the study of discrimination and reparative proposals – and choked up at the thought of Juneteenth legislation passing in the House and becoming law.
On Thursday, it did. “If we can pass this and if we can feel the joy instead of the pain, then I think we’ll open the door for H. R. 40,” she said. “The world understands reparations. ... It is an international concept of human rights.”
If all of that happens, no teacher should ever again perpetuate the misguided and painful notion that slavery was not that big of a deal.