Black Families Are #Exhausted
“DRIVING WHILE BLACK. Walking while black. Shopping while black. Selling CDs while black. Listening to music in a car while black. Asking for directions while black. Sitting in Starbucks while black.” Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham put it best in last week’s column, “It’s not just Starbucks: White fear is an American problem.” And this reality continues to leave black families, and black men in particular, in a constant state of trauma — never knowing when the next trigger (explicit or implicit, lethal or dehumanizing) will be pulled.
This trauma begins in the administration of discipline as early as pre-school, as the Yale Child Study Center reports, and persists through grade school. It continues with police interactions: where black male teens (ages 15–19) are 21-times more likely to be killed by cops than white male teens, and young black men up to the age of 34 are 9-times more likely than other Americans to be killed by cops, dramatically outnumbering criminal executions (the death penalty) in the U.S. and police killings in other countries across the world. (Not to mention the fact that police show more respect to whites than blacks — according to the recent study by Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and her team of linguists and computer scientists — and how that colors the disproportionate traffic stops that blacks, especially black men, endure.)
We know that implicit, or unconscious bias plays a role today, largely due to the malicious drug war media offensive of the Reagan administration that Attorney Michelle Alexander reveals in her zeitgeist-shifting book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:
As discussed in chapter 1, the Reagan administration launched a media campaign a few years after the drug war was announced in an effort to publicize horror stories involving black crack users and crack dealers in ghetto communities. Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order…
The media bonanza inspired by the administration’s campaign solidified in the public imagination the image of the black drug criminal. Although explicitly racial political appeals remained rare, the calls for “war” at a time when the media was saturated with images of black drug crime left little doubt about who the enemy was in the War on Drugs and exactly what he looked like. Jerome Miller, the former executive director of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, described the dynamic this way: “There are certain code words that allow you never to have to say ‘race,’ but everybody knows that’s what you mean and ‘crime’ is one of those. . . So when we talk about locking up more and more people, what we’re really talking about is locking up more and more black men.” Another commentator noted, “It is unnecessary to speak directly of race [today] because speaking about crime is talking about race.” Indeed, not long after the drug war was ramped up in the media and political discourse, almost no one imagined that drug criminals could be anything other than black.
A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups. These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.
But we also know that there’s a broader history that undergirds this record of trauma in America: from the postbellum terror of state-sanctioned convict leasing and mob lynchings to the postmodern terror of hate crimes, extrajudicial killings, and state-sanctioned mass incarceration compounded by the insidious, institutionally racist cycle of (1) redlined or segregated communities, (2) under-resourced schools, and (3) the racial wealth gap (so it should come as no surprise that the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Economic Development recently reported that it would take the average black family 228 years to build the wealth of a white family today). And then, of course, there’s the sweeping new study led by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and the Census Bureau that shows that “black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds” — debunking the popular “class over race” theory.
So the onus is on institutions (especially those educational and governmental) and individuals of power, influence, and privilege (which tend to be predominantly white) to lean-in, educate, and follow the example of post-Apartheid South Africa and post-Holocaust Germany with truth and reconciliation, because — as a people whose unparalleled contributions (e.g. building the economic foundation for the richest nation in the history of the world) continue to go unappreciated — black families, and black boys and men in particular, are simply exhausted.
Renaldo Michael Pearson is the Co-Mission Director of Democracy Spring. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is the Social Engineer-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Winthrop House.
