Official Protest Thread...
- Thread starter Camille
- Start date
Why Black lives matter.
Black lives matter.
They matter because they are children, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers.
They matter because the injustices they face steal from all of us — white people and people of color alike. They steal our very humanity.
Systemic and institutionalized racism are the defining civil rights and social justice issues of our time. We’ve come to understand that to be silent about the violence and threats to the lives and well-being of Black people is to be complicit in that violence and those threats.
We ask you to join us in not being complicit.
There is good news: the first step in overcoming systemic racism and injustice is to simply understand and admit that there is a problem. It’s trying to understand the perspective of others whose experiences are different from our own. To not just listen, but to truly understand those whose struggle for justice is real, and not yet complete.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President of the North Carolina NAACP, said it best when reacting to the recent police shooting in Charlotte, NC. He said, “Our objective is simple: to ensure justice-loving people act toward justice, with all evidence, and that we stand together and act from a place of power and love, rather than out of fear and anger.”
It’s been hard to watch the list of unarmed Black Americans killed by law enforcement officers grow longer and longer. We understand that numerous Black Americans and white Americans have profoundly different experiences and outcomes with law enforcement and the criminal justice system. That’s why it’s become clear to us at Ben & Jerry’s that we have a moral obligation to take a stand now for justice and for Black lives.
We want to be clear: we believe that saying Black lives matter is not to say that the lives of those who serve in the law enforcement community don’t. We respect and value the commitment to our communities that those in law enforcement make, and we respect the value of every one of their lives.
But we do believe that — whether Black, brown, white, or blue — our nation and our very way of life is dependent on the principle of all people being served equal justice under the law. And it’s clear, the effects of the criminal justice system are not color blind.
We do not place the blame for this on individual officers. Rather, we believe it is due to the systemic racism built into the fabric of our institutions at every level, disadvantaging and discriminating against people of color in ways that go beyond individual intent to discriminate. For this reason, we are not pointing fingers at individuals; we are instead urging us to come together to better our society and institutions so that we may finally fulfill the founding promise of this country: to be a country with dignity and justice for all.
All lives do matter. But all lives will not matter until Black lives matter.
We ask people to be open to understanding these issues, and not to reflexively retreat to our current beliefs. Change happens when people are willing to listen and hear the struggles of their neighbor, putting aside preconceived notions and truly seeking to understand and grow. We’ll be working hard on that, and ask you to as well.
- Your friends at Ben & Jerry’s
Delonte Wilkins was looking for a fresh start when he was released from Pennsylvania's Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in February. He polished his resume and applied to several jobs in his hometown of Washington, DC But when he was turned down for three job offers once those employers learned of his criminal background, Wilkins soon realized he couldn't easily leave his felony behind.
"I'm discouraged from applying to a lot of different jobs because I already know that I'm not going to pass the background check," says Wilkins, a certified electric systems technician. He doubted there was a space for African American workers with histories like his to thrive, particularly in Washington, DC, where the Black unemployment rate is the highest in the country, according to a 2015 Economic Policy Council report. Seven months ago, while seeking information about black worker-owned cooperatives, he joined a labor center to learn about workers' rights and civic engagement.
The DC Black Workers Center, established two years ago, is where Wilkins found employment possibilities, and a place that helps to build economic empowerment for African Americans in the city. Located in the United Black Fund building, which houses Black nonprofits, the DC Center takes a unique approach to its job-training services by addressing the twofold crises of high unemployment among Black workers and the low wages they're paid when they do find work. It is one of eight African American worker centers nationwide. The other centers are located in Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, CA., Greenville, Miss., Boston, and Raleigh-Rocky Mount, NC. A center in Baltimore is opening soon.
he National Black Workers Center Project, a national network that supports all of the centers, is working to shift the narrative on African American unemployment, which is 8.1 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics -- nearly double that of Whites. Steven Pitts, a board member at The Project, says that Black workers need to organize because they lack the power to influence public policy and attain economic freedom. He says it's the fundamental reason for high unemployment and low-wage positions, what he calls the Black job crisis.
"A closely related concern is the public narrative about [its] causes and solutions," says Pitts, who's also a labor economist at U.C. Berkeley. This is why one of the Project's first initiatives, Working While Black, will feature multimedia stories on their website about African American workers and local campaigns to improve access to high-quality jobs. The storytelling initiative will launch in mid-November.
The National Black Workers Center Project drew inspiration from immigrant centers that cropped up in the 1990s to offer legal services and advocacy for the influx of Latin American and Asian immigrants. In a similar fashion, the Black Workers centers use a member-led structure to address the unique challenges facing African American workers -- namely racial prejudice, discriminatory hiring practices, and the disproportionately high incarceration rate. "You build the most power when people are actively participating in shaping their own lives," says Pitts.
To do this, the organizers conduct surveys and hold listening sessions to adapt to the needs of the area. After noticing that Black construction workers were not being hired to work on new rail lines, the LA Center hosted a campaign to successfully employ more African Americans in the county's transportation projects. In Oakland, the Bay Area Black Workers Center was part of a coalition that convinced the county's board of supervisors to vote in favor of hiring 1,400 formerly incarcerated residents for various positions with the county in June. A coordinating committee in Baltimore is also in the beginning stages of creating a labor center to address the predominantly African American city's vast income inequality.
In DC, the Center focuses on reducing the unemployment gap. In addition to job training, organizers partner with labor unions and offer construction skills trainingto increase access to higher-wage positions. Some desired jobs include railroad maintenance work, demolition and asbestos removal, and construction on federal government projects, which pay up to $30 an hour. So far, 25 members have received general construction skills training, and 10 of them were offered jobs with construction companies.
They also teach members cooperative organizing. Last year, members received training in workplace democracies, in which they learned how to recruit other workers and create their own cooperatives. Lawyers explained the legal steps of developing a cooperative, and some members shared their observations from a visit to a child care cooperative in West Philadelphia. The visit has inspired some women at the DC Center to start a child care co-op.
Wilkins says the Center emphasizes co-ops because they have a democratic approach that allows all of the workers to have equal footing. To him, cooperatives allow communities to determine where they work and how much they'll be paid. Housing, food, and jobs are "a human right," he says, "not a commodity."
Unlike other job training hubs in the city, the DC Center provides a space for members, at their monthly meetings, to have cathartic conversations about their work experiences. Sometimes they discuss the discrimination they face for having African American names, or talk about deconstructing Black respectability politics, in which African Americans police their own values to fit into the White mainstream. Overall, the meetings focus on topics ranging from the fight for a $15-minimum wage to organizing labor unions. Up to 40 people regularly attend the meetings, although there are about 1,200 in the Center's database.
Members sit around a large table wearing work attire ranging from suits and ties to auto-mechanic jumpsuits. During some sessions, labor unions conduct workshops on organizing low-wage retail workers, and familiarize workers with their rights. "The purpose of the Black Worker Center is to create a space where people build power and understand the politics of their work, where they build skills to enhance their opportunity to get good work, and where, through co-ops organizing, we can control and create our own labor," says Dominic Moulden, a resource organizer at the DC Center.
Moulden recruits members by walking door to door, and talking to strangers, in laundromats and metro stops. During these engagement walks, he estimates he and other members have asked nearly 100 people about their employment history and career goals. Members then brainstorm ways to offer resources related to the community's concerns.
During recruitment sessions, Moulden, who has worked in DC as an organizer for various social justice campaigns for the past 30 years, discovered that some workers with low-wage jobs had received multiple certificates and ample training, but they were still unable to get ahead. "People were trained to death, but still unemployed," he says. So, they partnered with the construction worker union LiUNA, the Laborers' International Union of North America, to provide members with training on construction and asbestos removal. In March, the labor union held an intake session for DC Center members and connected them with companies that offered 10 jobs.
Raymin Diaz, a union labor and community organizer at LiUNA Mid-Atlantic, says the DC Center fills the gap between training and employment opportunities. Many of the area's other training facilities do not offer a clear pathway to a job, he says. Although the capital is teeming with construction sites, Diaz says he often encountered overqualified workers with skills certificates who were unable to find employment.
"Unfortunately the individuals who live in that city and pay tax money are not profiting from that boom. A lot of them are being pushed out of the city," Diaz says. LiUNA seeks to change that by offering Black Workers Center members construction skills training, collecting job applications, and connecting them with union contractors. LiUNA's partnership with the Center works toward the common goal of ending systemic disenfranchisement, he adds. Diaz says he hopes members will find one sustainable job instead of relying on several gigs to support their families. "Collectively, our effort is to give everyone a fair shot."
At the beginning of next year, the DC Center will roll out its apprenticeship pilot program, ApprenticeShift, which trains Black workers to code. As part of their fundraising, they've asked the city's workforce investment council to divest nearly $3 million from failed work development programs and reallocate the funding to the tech initiative. Wilkins says the program will go forward without it, but they're not sure how long it will last if they don't have that support.
It's not just people from the Black labor movement who favor the centers. Cultural workers, like vegan chef Elijah Joy, joined the DC Center as an advisory council member to network with others and to learn about worker cooperatives. He dreams of one day starting a food co-op that embraces local produce, Black culture, and personal history. Food deserts are common where the Center is located in Southeast DC.
"What I see in DC is that there's a lot of need, but there's also a lot of people doing great work," Joy says, but he found that similar organizations rarely shared ideas. "They all have the same goal: more access for housing, more clothing, more food, more shelter." He plans on using the organizing skills he has learned at the Center to collaborate with organizations aimed at improving African American residents' health and wellness.
It's been only two years, and the DC Black Workers Center has offered job skills training and moral support to hundreds of African American men and women, and has even helped some of them find jobs and start co-ops. And although it focuses on helping workers find employment at outside establishments, some members have been hired as staff. After being rejected for several jobs in his field because of his criminal record, Wilkins was recently hired by the DC Center as an organizer. What's paramount in the fight for economic empowerment, Wilkins says, is that everyone at the Center has a voice, and works together to address the needs of the community.
"Building economic power in DC is necessary to gain the liberation that I want," he says.
The standard curriculum in most American public schools is heavily centered around the historic and contemporary contributions of white men. When contributions of minorities and black people, in particular, are even included, the lessons are often relegated to secondary, if not subservient narratives. Combine this indoctrination with the everyday reality of racism, black children internalize subtle messages of inferiority by the time they reach their preteen years.
Fed up with this phenomenon, Detroit teacher Kufere Laing decided to do something about it. In an interview with Atlanta Black Star, Laing said, “At no point in time are Black students given the opportunity to think about why and how do we exist in this world.”
To create a solution to this hurdle, the social studies teacher to seventh and eighth graders at Voyager Academy, launched a fundraising campaign raising over $1700 to provide students with books centered around black culture. Included in this syllabus are The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Skin I’m In and You Don’t Even Know Me Stories and Poems About Boys by Sharon G. Flake, Monster and Slam! by Walter Dean Myers and A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Laing's teaching style and his understanding of the need for a more robust curriculum for his 25 students is driven largely, in part, by his own coming of age experiences.
“I’m in a lot of different African-American communities...I can communicate with my students in a common language. And it’s not just the words that I’m using, but it’s also the rhythm that Black people speak in. Even my mannerisms are influenced by these Black experiences,” he stated.
"Often times, the information put in front of Black students isn’t at all relatable,” he said. “With pre-teens, it’s important to have a lot of work around identity. Who you are in this world, how can we make sense of your experience?”.
This Pittsburgh native of the historically black Hill District and member of Omega Psi Phi, is helping his students to come to terms with those questions and providing yet another example of why more black teachers are needed in the classroom.
Black America's Invisible Crisis
The U.S. Government provides care for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But what about the thousands of African-Americans living in violent cities and suffering from the same condition?
This article is a collaboration between ESSENCE and ProPublica.
Last October, Aireana* and her boyfriend were driving through Oakland when a man on the street opened fire on their car. Her two children, ages 6 and 1, were in the backseat. Aireana remembers feeling something slam into her jaw and hearing a sound like a firecracker popping in her head. Her boyfriend hit the accelerator and swerved down the street. He and Aireana turned at the same moment to check on the kids. They were safe. Then her boyfriend looked at her and saw blood spurting from her neck. “Oh, my God,” he said, panicking, and crashed into a parked car.
In the shock after the crash, Aireana had only one coherent thought: I cannot die in front of my kids. They cannot see me die. She unbuckled her seat belt and pushed herself out of the car. As she stood, she felt dizzy and closed her eyes. But the thought of her children propelled her forward. They can’t see my body lying here dead. Still dazed, she walked away from the car. She could hear her daughter screaming behind her, “My mom’s dying!”
Earlier that afternoon, Aireana had gotten her kids ready to go to the park. She had taken meat out of the freezer to thaw for dinner. Her life, at 24, finally felt on track. That year had been hard: She had been unemployed for the first half of 2013 with no stable place to live. After scoring a new office job that summer, she moved into a two-bedroom apartment with her kids. She remembers feeling pretty as she looked at herself in the mirror on the way to the car.
A bullet had smashed through her front teeth, grazed her tongue and broken her jaw. In the emergency room, the surgeons repaired her tongue. Later, they wired her jaw shut so that it could heal. Aireana stayed in the hospital for more than a month. When she went home, her face was still puffy and swollen, and she had a hard time talking. Fragments of the bullet were still lodged in the side of her neck.
“You’re so lucky,” her friends kept telling her. “Why are you still so sad? You’re okay—you’re alive.” But Aireana couldn’t stop thinking about the shooting. She felt guilty, as if it were her fault that she had been hit. Why hadn’t she lifted her arm to block the bullet? Why hadn’t she ducked? The shooting played over and over in her dreams. Sometimes, reliving it, she remembered to duck, and then the bullet passed over her and hit one of her children. She’d wake up in a panic, soaked in sweat.
Every day at 3 p.m., Aireana paused at her front door. She knew she should go out and meet her daughter, who would be walking back home from school just around the corner. But the busy street overwhelmed her. Sometimes she would make it down to the end of the driveway in front of their apartment and then turn back.
In the aftermath of the shooting, she struggled to pay her bills. The phone company cut off her cell phone, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Instead, she spent most of the day asleep. When she became tired of lying in bed, she’d curl up on the living room floor.
In America, violent crime is down significantly since 1993, when the nation’s gun homicide rate hit its peak. But there are still neighborhoods in cities like Oakland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark, New Jersey, where shootings are a constant occurrence and where the per capita murder rates are drastically higher than the rest of the country. Some 3,500 American troops were killed during the eight-year war in Iraq. Within the same time period, 3,113 people were killed on the streets of Philadelphia. According to FBI data, between 2002 and 2012 Chicago lost more than 5,000 people to homicide—that’s nearly three times the number of Americans killed in action in Afghanistan.
Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 innercity residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs. Though most people with post-traumatic stress are not violent, PTSD is also associated with an increased risk of aggression and violent behavior, including domestic violence. The Atlanta researchers found that civilians they interviewed who had PTSD were more likely to have been charged with a violent crime and incarcerated than other people of similar backgrounds without PTSD—but the cause and effect behind this wasn’t clear. For some people, PTSD symptoms may have contributed to their involvement in the criminal justice system, while others may have developed PTSD later. “Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety,” the researchers wrote.
Despite the growing evidence of PTSD in civilians, little is being done to address the problem. Hospital trauma centers often provide adequate care for physical wounds, but do almost nothing to help patients cope with the mental and emotional aftermath of trauma. A 2014 ProPublica survey of 21 trauma centers in the nation’s most violent cities found that only three—in New Orleans, Detroit and Richmond—routinely screened victims of violence for the disorder. Trauma surgeons said they were aware of the burden of post-traumatic stress on their patients, but it was hard to get hospitals to spend money on new programs or staff to deal with PTSD. Even Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, where researchers found that 43 percent of injured patients showed signs of the condition, has struggled to raise funds to support a new program. Doctors said they also worried about the scarcity of mental health providers, especially for low-income patients without insurance. Some said they were reluctant to screenpatients for PTSD because they could not be sure they would get treatment.
What’s more, many doctors and nurses assume that shooting victims—especially young Black men—are responsible for what happened to them, says John Porter, M.D., a trauma surgeon in Jackson, Mississippi, which has a higher per capita homicide rate than Chicago’s. The line of thinking is It’s their own fault, so who cares? We’ll save their life, but who cares? But post-traumatic stress doesn’t distinguish between “innocent” and “not innocent” victims. Researchers have found gang members are just as likely to suffer from post- traumatic stress as anyone else.
The burden of post-traumatic stress on low-income communities of color gets very little attention. What public recognition it does receive is often sensationalized: A TV reporter apologized this spring after a segment on young people dealing with trauma in Oakland referred to PTSD as “hood disease.” “Someone in the community has to stand up and say, ‘Because of all the gun violence, we have a lot of traumatized people—and it’s not just the people who are being shot and shot at, it’s the people who are witnessing it, the vicarious trauma,’” says Arthur C. Evans, Jr., Ph.D., the commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services. With the support of Mayor Michael Nutter, Evans has pushed Philadelphia to treat trauma as a major public health issue and to develop a comprehensive approach to PTSD. Over the past eight years, city officials have worked with hospitals, community mental health clinics, pediatricians, schoolteachers and police officers to increase awareness of the disorder and make sure residents are connected with treatment professionals. “We have to stop telling our kids they just have to live with this,” Evans says.
The city has paid to train local therapists in evidence-based PTSD treatments and has launched a Web site—healthymindsphilly.org, which allows people to screen themselves for the symptoms of PTSD anonymously—as a way of reaching people who might be reluctant to visit a mental health clinic. Philly has also partnered with local faith groups to train leaders about mental health resources, because “in the African-American community, people often go to their faith leaders before they will come to a treatment professional,” Evans says. Philadelphia’s police department is educating its officers about mental health and the effects of trauma. “People who have untreated trauma are highly reactive, and it doesn’t take much to set them off,” Evans says. Crisis intervention training helps officers discern between someone who is being obstinate and someone who “might have some other issues that are driving the behavior,” Evans says. The training also helps officers learn how to de-escalate a situation, rather than react with force. Philadelphia’s broad approach to PTSD includes a technique that’s already being tried in other cities: reaching out to victims of violence in the immediate aftermath of a shooting and bringing trauma education right to their hospital bedsides.
When Aireana was lying in Oakland's Highland Hospital last fall with her jaw wired shut, one of her visitors was Rafael Vasquez, an intervention specialist with Youth Alive!, the nonprofit group that founded the nation’s first hospital-based violence intervention program in 1994. Tall and solidly built, Vasquez sometimes has to reassure patients he’s not an undercover cop. His goal is to ensure that victims of violence stay safe after they leave the hospital and that they never come back under similar circumstances.
Over the winter, Youth Alive!’s licensed marriage and family therapist, Nicky MacCallum, visited Aireana at home to conduct therapy with her daughter. For people who have grown up in violent neighborhoods, the traditional 50-minute therapy session is not always right for them. “Many times young people would walk out not having connected with the therapists, not feeling they could relate to them,” Vasquez says. “They were overwhelmed by the whole experience.” MacCallum has held sessions in coffee shops and parking lots and even on basketball courts while clients shot hoops. By bringing therapy out of the clinic and into the community, Youth Alive! has seen an increase in the number of patients engaged in active therapy: from about 5 percent of its clients to 35 percent.
MacCallum taught Aireana’s 6-year-old how to calm herself down with deep belly breaths. She talked to the girl about trauma in age-appropriate ways, asking if she ever felt like a turtle, hiding in her shell, or a prickly porcupine. Sometimes MacCallum and Aireana’s daughter would sit on the living room floor and draw together as a way to express emotions difficult to put into words. Aireana started by sitting off to one side and watching the sessions. When the therapist told her, “Adults can draw too,” she then picked up a marker herself. This led to Aireana finally sitting down with MacCallum for a session of her own. They started by talking through a list of trauma symptoms: sleep problems, anxiety, fear of going outside. “I’ve got that,” Aireana remembers saying. “That too.”
MacCallum diagnosed Aireana with PTSD. “Nicky helped me,” Aireana says. “She was the first person I actually talked to who believed it was real, that my feelings were real.” MacCallum and other therapists say PTSD is the best diagnosis they can give in these instances—but that it’s not a perfect fit. For clients who live in violent neighborhoods, the trauma that they’re dealing with isn’t really “post.” “People in our community are constantly retraumatized,” MacCallum says. The street where Aireana was shot was only minutes away from the place where she had witnessed her first drive-by shooting when she was 8. She had been at a block party near her aunt’s house in East Oakland and thought she heard fireworks. She has a vivid memory of what she found instead: a car, in the middle of the road, with the driver slumped over, already dead, and blood running out of the car. A few weeks after Aireana came home from the hospital last winter, a young man was murdered on the street in front of her house. She remembers seeing his last heaving breaths and his friends yelling and no one around to help. She broke down. This is happening all over again, she thought.
There’s no Department of Veterans Affairs to coordinate care for Americans repeatedly exposed to violence and trauma in their own neighborhoods. One of the first steps in addressing community PTSD, says Evans, who is leading Philadelphia’s trauma response, is to “get people to come around the table. Get a few mental health professionals, a few pastors and a few human services people who are seeing the impact of this to come together and have a conversation. That’s what we did.” Community members who want to learn how they can help loved ones struggling with PTSD or other mental health issues can sign up for Mental Health First Aid, an eight-hour course run by the National Council for Behavioral Health that can also assist community groups with setting up their own training programs. The National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network also offer resources for PTSD caused by community violence.
Over the summer in Oakland, Aireana’s children were terrified by the sound of fireworks. They kept thinking they were hearing gunshots. This past Fourth of July, Aireana decided she would try to help her kids adjust to the sound, rather than shutting it out. As her neighbors set off firecrackers in the street, she kept her kids at a distance. She pointed to the lights: “That one’s cool.” A purple explosion: “Oooh, nice.” Gradually, they walked closer. Later, she gave her kids sparklers and watched them run around making glowing scribbles in the dark. She had always loved fireworks. It was good to see her kids not being afraid and enjoying them, too.
Lois Beckett (lois.beckett@propublica.org) is an investigative reporter for ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that produces journalism in the public interest.
*Subject has asked to be identified only by her first name.
Does your local hospital help victims of violence find treatment for PTSD? See the results of ProPublica’s 21-city survey.
http://www.essence.com/2014/09/05/propublica-post-traumatic-stress-disorder
The U.S. Government provides care for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But what about the thousands of African-Americans living in violent cities and suffering from the same condition?
This article is a collaboration between ESSENCE and ProPublica.
Last October, Aireana* and her boyfriend were driving through Oakland when a man on the street opened fire on their car. Her two children, ages 6 and 1, were in the backseat. Aireana remembers feeling something slam into her jaw and hearing a sound like a firecracker popping in her head. Her boyfriend hit the accelerator and swerved down the street. He and Aireana turned at the same moment to check on the kids. They were safe. Then her boyfriend looked at her and saw blood spurting from her neck. “Oh, my God,” he said, panicking, and crashed into a parked car.
In the shock after the crash, Aireana had only one coherent thought: I cannot die in front of my kids. They cannot see me die. She unbuckled her seat belt and pushed herself out of the car. As she stood, she felt dizzy and closed her eyes. But the thought of her children propelled her forward. They can’t see my body lying here dead. Still dazed, she walked away from the car. She could hear her daughter screaming behind her, “My mom’s dying!”
Earlier that afternoon, Aireana had gotten her kids ready to go to the park. She had taken meat out of the freezer to thaw for dinner. Her life, at 24, finally felt on track. That year had been hard: She had been unemployed for the first half of 2013 with no stable place to live. After scoring a new office job that summer, she moved into a two-bedroom apartment with her kids. She remembers feeling pretty as she looked at herself in the mirror on the way to the car.
A bullet had smashed through her front teeth, grazed her tongue and broken her jaw. In the emergency room, the surgeons repaired her tongue. Later, they wired her jaw shut so that it could heal. Aireana stayed in the hospital for more than a month. When she went home, her face was still puffy and swollen, and she had a hard time talking. Fragments of the bullet were still lodged in the side of her neck.
“You’re so lucky,” her friends kept telling her. “Why are you still so sad? You’re okay—you’re alive.” But Aireana couldn’t stop thinking about the shooting. She felt guilty, as if it were her fault that she had been hit. Why hadn’t she lifted her arm to block the bullet? Why hadn’t she ducked? The shooting played over and over in her dreams. Sometimes, reliving it, she remembered to duck, and then the bullet passed over her and hit one of her children. She’d wake up in a panic, soaked in sweat.
Every day at 3 p.m., Aireana paused at her front door. She knew she should go out and meet her daughter, who would be walking back home from school just around the corner. But the busy street overwhelmed her. Sometimes she would make it down to the end of the driveway in front of their apartment and then turn back.
In the aftermath of the shooting, she struggled to pay her bills. The phone company cut off her cell phone, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Instead, she spent most of the day asleep. When she became tired of lying in bed, she’d curl up on the living room floor.
In America, violent crime is down significantly since 1993, when the nation’s gun homicide rate hit its peak. But there are still neighborhoods in cities like Oakland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark, New Jersey, where shootings are a constant occurrence and where the per capita murder rates are drastically higher than the rest of the country. Some 3,500 American troops were killed during the eight-year war in Iraq. Within the same time period, 3,113 people were killed on the streets of Philadelphia. According to FBI data, between 2002 and 2012 Chicago lost more than 5,000 people to homicide—that’s nearly three times the number of Americans killed in action in Afghanistan.
Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 innercity residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs. Though most people with post-traumatic stress are not violent, PTSD is also associated with an increased risk of aggression and violent behavior, including domestic violence. The Atlanta researchers found that civilians they interviewed who had PTSD were more likely to have been charged with a violent crime and incarcerated than other people of similar backgrounds without PTSD—but the cause and effect behind this wasn’t clear. For some people, PTSD symptoms may have contributed to their involvement in the criminal justice system, while others may have developed PTSD later. “Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety,” the researchers wrote.
Despite the growing evidence of PTSD in civilians, little is being done to address the problem. Hospital trauma centers often provide adequate care for physical wounds, but do almost nothing to help patients cope with the mental and emotional aftermath of trauma. A 2014 ProPublica survey of 21 trauma centers in the nation’s most violent cities found that only three—in New Orleans, Detroit and Richmond—routinely screened victims of violence for the disorder. Trauma surgeons said they were aware of the burden of post-traumatic stress on their patients, but it was hard to get hospitals to spend money on new programs or staff to deal with PTSD. Even Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, where researchers found that 43 percent of injured patients showed signs of the condition, has struggled to raise funds to support a new program. Doctors said they also worried about the scarcity of mental health providers, especially for low-income patients without insurance. Some said they were reluctant to screenpatients for PTSD because they could not be sure they would get treatment.
What’s more, many doctors and nurses assume that shooting victims—especially young Black men—are responsible for what happened to them, says John Porter, M.D., a trauma surgeon in Jackson, Mississippi, which has a higher per capita homicide rate than Chicago’s. The line of thinking is It’s their own fault, so who cares? We’ll save their life, but who cares? But post-traumatic stress doesn’t distinguish between “innocent” and “not innocent” victims. Researchers have found gang members are just as likely to suffer from post- traumatic stress as anyone else.
The burden of post-traumatic stress on low-income communities of color gets very little attention. What public recognition it does receive is often sensationalized: A TV reporter apologized this spring after a segment on young people dealing with trauma in Oakland referred to PTSD as “hood disease.” “Someone in the community has to stand up and say, ‘Because of all the gun violence, we have a lot of traumatized people—and it’s not just the people who are being shot and shot at, it’s the people who are witnessing it, the vicarious trauma,’” says Arthur C. Evans, Jr., Ph.D., the commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services. With the support of Mayor Michael Nutter, Evans has pushed Philadelphia to treat trauma as a major public health issue and to develop a comprehensive approach to PTSD. Over the past eight years, city officials have worked with hospitals, community mental health clinics, pediatricians, schoolteachers and police officers to increase awareness of the disorder and make sure residents are connected with treatment professionals. “We have to stop telling our kids they just have to live with this,” Evans says.
The city has paid to train local therapists in evidence-based PTSD treatments and has launched a Web site—healthymindsphilly.org, which allows people to screen themselves for the symptoms of PTSD anonymously—as a way of reaching people who might be reluctant to visit a mental health clinic. Philly has also partnered with local faith groups to train leaders about mental health resources, because “in the African-American community, people often go to their faith leaders before they will come to a treatment professional,” Evans says. Philadelphia’s police department is educating its officers about mental health and the effects of trauma. “People who have untreated trauma are highly reactive, and it doesn’t take much to set them off,” Evans says. Crisis intervention training helps officers discern between someone who is being obstinate and someone who “might have some other issues that are driving the behavior,” Evans says. The training also helps officers learn how to de-escalate a situation, rather than react with force. Philadelphia’s broad approach to PTSD includes a technique that’s already being tried in other cities: reaching out to victims of violence in the immediate aftermath of a shooting and bringing trauma education right to their hospital bedsides.
When Aireana was lying in Oakland's Highland Hospital last fall with her jaw wired shut, one of her visitors was Rafael Vasquez, an intervention specialist with Youth Alive!, the nonprofit group that founded the nation’s first hospital-based violence intervention program in 1994. Tall and solidly built, Vasquez sometimes has to reassure patients he’s not an undercover cop. His goal is to ensure that victims of violence stay safe after they leave the hospital and that they never come back under similar circumstances.
Over the winter, Youth Alive!’s licensed marriage and family therapist, Nicky MacCallum, visited Aireana at home to conduct therapy with her daughter. For people who have grown up in violent neighborhoods, the traditional 50-minute therapy session is not always right for them. “Many times young people would walk out not having connected with the therapists, not feeling they could relate to them,” Vasquez says. “They were overwhelmed by the whole experience.” MacCallum has held sessions in coffee shops and parking lots and even on basketball courts while clients shot hoops. By bringing therapy out of the clinic and into the community, Youth Alive! has seen an increase in the number of patients engaged in active therapy: from about 5 percent of its clients to 35 percent.
MacCallum taught Aireana’s 6-year-old how to calm herself down with deep belly breaths. She talked to the girl about trauma in age-appropriate ways, asking if she ever felt like a turtle, hiding in her shell, or a prickly porcupine. Sometimes MacCallum and Aireana’s daughter would sit on the living room floor and draw together as a way to express emotions difficult to put into words. Aireana started by sitting off to one side and watching the sessions. When the therapist told her, “Adults can draw too,” she then picked up a marker herself. This led to Aireana finally sitting down with MacCallum for a session of her own. They started by talking through a list of trauma symptoms: sleep problems, anxiety, fear of going outside. “I’ve got that,” Aireana remembers saying. “That too.”
MacCallum diagnosed Aireana with PTSD. “Nicky helped me,” Aireana says. “She was the first person I actually talked to who believed it was real, that my feelings were real.” MacCallum and other therapists say PTSD is the best diagnosis they can give in these instances—but that it’s not a perfect fit. For clients who live in violent neighborhoods, the trauma that they’re dealing with isn’t really “post.” “People in our community are constantly retraumatized,” MacCallum says. The street where Aireana was shot was only minutes away from the place where she had witnessed her first drive-by shooting when she was 8. She had been at a block party near her aunt’s house in East Oakland and thought she heard fireworks. She has a vivid memory of what she found instead: a car, in the middle of the road, with the driver slumped over, already dead, and blood running out of the car. A few weeks after Aireana came home from the hospital last winter, a young man was murdered on the street in front of her house. She remembers seeing his last heaving breaths and his friends yelling and no one around to help. She broke down. This is happening all over again, she thought.
There’s no Department of Veterans Affairs to coordinate care for Americans repeatedly exposed to violence and trauma in their own neighborhoods. One of the first steps in addressing community PTSD, says Evans, who is leading Philadelphia’s trauma response, is to “get people to come around the table. Get a few mental health professionals, a few pastors and a few human services people who are seeing the impact of this to come together and have a conversation. That’s what we did.” Community members who want to learn how they can help loved ones struggling with PTSD or other mental health issues can sign up for Mental Health First Aid, an eight-hour course run by the National Council for Behavioral Health that can also assist community groups with setting up their own training programs. The National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network also offer resources for PTSD caused by community violence.
Over the summer in Oakland, Aireana’s children were terrified by the sound of fireworks. They kept thinking they were hearing gunshots. This past Fourth of July, Aireana decided she would try to help her kids adjust to the sound, rather than shutting it out. As her neighbors set off firecrackers in the street, she kept her kids at a distance. She pointed to the lights: “That one’s cool.” A purple explosion: “Oooh, nice.” Gradually, they walked closer. Later, she gave her kids sparklers and watched them run around making glowing scribbles in the dark. She had always loved fireworks. It was good to see her kids not being afraid and enjoying them, too.
Lois Beckett (lois.beckett@propublica.org) is an investigative reporter for ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that produces journalism in the public interest.
*Subject has asked to be identified only by her first name.
Does your local hospital help victims of violence find treatment for PTSD? See the results of ProPublica’s 21-city survey.
http://www.essence.com/2014/09/05/propublica-post-traumatic-stress-disorder
