BLMHM Podcast

Welcome to the Black Lives Mental Health Matters podcast hosted by Kwabena Siaka. This podcast looks through a trauma-informed lens at the trauma that black and brown folks and people of color have experienced historically in the United States of America. This podcast explores the justification for reparations to the black and brown communities for the psychological and physical harm that has been and is being done to these communities by individuals and communities acting with coordinated conscious and unconscious schemes to destroy black and brown people's self-esteem, self-confidence, and their self-worth. Trauma acted on these communities for the expressed purposes of controlling their will and their bodies for their financial and social gain and advancement. Let's begin with a brief historical summary of the arguments for and against reparations. To be sure, we have heard a lot about reparations and the various arguments for and against in the news lately. Some have said as an argument against reparations, look at the progress that black folks have made since the Emancipation Proclamation or the end of the Civil War. Some have even said that racism is no longer present in American life and therefore argue that actions by those in the past who enslaved others without compensation do not require reparations. What's more, those in the present shouldn't be held responsible for what their ancestors did in the past and they brush away 300 years of slavery of black folks and brown folks and other people of color without compensation. They added that this was just a blip in history and we should just move on. There are a number of well-traveled myths in this country regarding slavery and those enslaved. For example, there's another well-traveled myth in some circles, and that is that slaves were treated kindly by the slave owners, therefore suggesting slavery was not that bad or was even actually a good thing for those enslaved. You see there's a lot of the media when you notice that they often depict enslaved people as happy or worshiping the slave owners. Actually this is contrary to the reality. There are numerous books and articles documenting how slaves in America were treated during their slavery times. Googling the keywords treatment of slaves during slavery in the United States of America will bring up many resources for you to review. William T. Allen, a slave owners abolitionist son who could not safely return to Alabama, once said, Cruelty was the rule and kindness the exception." He also continued by adding that whipping and rape were routine practices that usually did not occur in front of white outsiders or even the plantations owners family. What has been well recorded is the ignorance of former slaves to take up arms against their former owners. This does not sound like folks who were treated well. The reality is that slaves were relentlessly traumatized by their owners psychologically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. The cruelty employed to enforce obedience and maintain psychological control of people enslaved included lynching, mutilation, general torture, castration, sexual assault, torture instruments used to subject those held in slavery to the most uncomfortable treatment imaginable. Rubbing pepper, salt, and other hard substances in wounds was also used. Brutal whipping, branding, and shackling, just to name a few of the most common inhumane practices people held in slavery in the United States were subjected to. This behavior reached into every aspect of an enslaved person's life. For example, teaching slaves to read was also prohibited. Those souls held in slavery were discouraged or prevented from education because of the paranoid fears of their owners that if they were allowed to read they would become uppity and would likely foment a rebellion. We hear echoes of this paranoia even today. In 1841, in Virginia, where I attended high school, at one time punished violations of this law by 20 lashes to the slave and a hundred dollar fine to the teacher. In North Carolina, not to be outdone by Virginia, upped the punishment for teaching slaves to read and write to 39 lashes to the slave and a $250 fine to the teacher and so on. This was the attitude in this country, especially in the South, regarding reading and writing of slaves. In letters on slavery written in 1826, John Rankin, a well-known abolitionist, wrote, thousands of them are pressed with the gnawings of cruel hunger during their whole lives and an insatiable avarice will not grant them a single comfortable meal to satisfy the cravings of nature. Such cruelty far exceeds the powers of description. Thousands of them are really starving in a state of slavery and are under the direful necessity of stealing whatever they can find that will satisfy the cravings of hunger and I have little doubt but many starve to death." This further certainly contradicts the notion that slaves were better off being enslaved than not. The only retreat the enslaved had at some times was in their quarters and that is where enslaved people developed and passed down skills which were allowed which allowed them to supplement their poor diet and inadequate medical care with hunting, fishing, gathering wild food and herbal medicines and there the adults taught their children how to hide their feelings to escape punishment and to be skeptical of anything a white person said. Many slave parents told their children that blacks were superior to white people who were lazy and incapable of running things properly, an opportunity to try to salvage some measure of self-esteem or self-worth and as a means of survival in a cruel and mean world. Although this may seem odd even unseemly and unfair to many when we look at the current movement to remove critical race theory from schools we can see a pattern. This is a variation of the theme based on the same reasoning. We let them read but only what we want them to because telling the truth about what happened to folks enslaved might be too scary for our children to hear or know or even further might lead to societal unrest empowered by this new knowledge of inhumane treatment perpetrated against black folks and others. The argument by those who arrogantly object to telling the other side of the story go a long way back in time directly to slavers and the slave mentality who prevented black folks from reading at all. The experience in achievements of black, brown and other people of color have been whitewashed from nearly all the approved texts in k-12 education. Increasingly black texts and additive theories put forth by black and brown thinkers and educators are being challenged, attacked and threatened every day primarily by conservative white parents who are outraged that the experience of others that does not conform to their view of America may be told. This reflects part of the old hegemony of white supremacy which attempted to dictate and limit what can and cannot be told about our history raising his ugly head again. This is rinse and repeat of the slavery mentality that persists obviously to this day. Though the Emancipation Proclamation outlawed slavery in the rebellious states it did not outlaw slavery in those northern states held by Union folks. That didn't occur until the end of the Civil War. The dismantling of civil rights continued for black and brown folks. What's more the General Amnesty Act in 1872 gave the former Confederate soldiers who had fought against the Union the right to hold public office again. Post slavery brought its own form of terror to those folks formerly enslaved. Although black men were given the right to vote black women were not. In the South Jim Crow laws were passed. The undermining of the gains made by black and brown folks with the end of the war started to unravel with the General Amnesty Act of 1872 which let former Confederates take public office and they did so and started to rewrite the laws affecting black and brown folks and their freedom. With this newfound power southerners and southern sympathizers of the lost cause packed courts and the Congress with their own agenda to undermine the rights of black and brown folks. For example in 1866 the Ku Klux Klan was formed and ran essentially unimpeded through the black and brown communities terrorizing them without any consequence whatsoever. They not only used violence against black Americans but they also used violence against white Republicans and at that time who were Lincoln Republicans. Their goal was to move them from the polls so that they couldn't exercise their right to vote and therefore allowed white southerners and those who sympathize with them the opportunity to control the narrative and to create policies that undermined the rights of black and brown communities and individuals. Separate but equal refers to the infamously racist decision by the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson which was decided in 1896 that allowed the use of segregation laws by states and local governments. This decision continued to onslaught against the black and brown communities and was upheld until 1954. That decision was Brown v. Board of Education one that many people have heard about by now. In that decision the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional and was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement and helped establish the precedent that separate but equal education and other services were not in fact equal at all. It is well known that these schools, black schools, were underfunded and under-resourced and this was a pattern of discrimination that goes all the way back to Plessy and before. But I digress. The point here is that black community has been attacked and traumatized in every facet of human life. Now that we have briefly summarized some of the historical facts and dismantled some of the well-traveled myths about the treatment of slaves during slavery and after slavery, let us turn our attention to the concept of trauma and let's dig deep into this so that we can understand what trauma is and how it operates within the human being. Let's start out by defining what trauma is according to its current usage by mental health professions. And when I say mental health professions, I'm talking about psychologists, therapists, social workers, and other professionals working in supporting roles such as psychiatrists who are working under the DSM-5 diagnostic manual. Thank you for listening to Black Lives Mental Health Matters podcast hosted by Kwabena Siaka and produced by Value Creation Counseling PDX, LLC. This podcast looks at the justification for reparations to the community through a trauma-informed lens.