The Ancient Greeks defined mental disorders as “being possessed and punished by the Gods for wrongdoing and can only be cured by prayer”. Greek physicians and philosophers wrote their theories about the treatment of some mental disorders without practicing. In Judeo-Christian societies, mental illness was often seen as “a divine punishment” and “a divine gift”. Some mental disorders were well known in Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Persia, India and China. With the advent of Islam, a revolution emerged in all scientific fields, including psychology, which will later strongly influence the Western modern psychology.
Muslim physicians were interested in all branches of medicine, including psychology. In the early phase of Islamic medicine, psychology was included in general medicine. After that, the Muslim physicians classified it as a separate branch in medicine. From that moment they will call it “‘ilaadj an-nafs” (the treatment of the soul) or “tib al-qalb” (healing of the heart or mental medicine).
Muslim physicians wrote about many mental diseases like anxiety, depression, melancholia, epilepsy, schizophrenia, paranoia, forgetfulness, sexual disorder, persecutory delusions and obsessive-compulsive disorder among other mental diseases. They were the first ones to add ‘psychosomatic disorder’ to the vocabulary of the history of psychology. They also believed that mental illness was caused by chemical imbalances affecting the brain.
In medieval Islam, a person with mental illness was called “madjnun” (foolish). He was not regarded as a persona non grata, an outcast or a scapegoat. According to the Islamic faith, a Muslim must be kind with them and treat them well.
Many hospitals were established during the early Islamic era. The idea was taken from the time of the prophet Muhammad, where the first hospital took place in the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah. The first true Islamic hospital was built in the 9th century, during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun ar-Rashid in Baghdad. The Muslims called it a “Bimaristan”, a Persian word meaning “the house where sick people were welcomed and cared for by qualified staff”. People with mental disorders were not excluded.
Physicians and nurses had the duty to look after all the patients, regardless of their religion, race, citizenship or gender. A Bimaristan was necessary to support all patients until they were fully recovered. Every Bimaristan contained a garden, a fountain, a lecture hall, a library, a kitchen, a pharmacy and prayer rooms for Muslims and non-Muslims. Recreational materials and musicians were selected to create happiness. Men and women were taken into separate, but equally equipped wards and were accompanied by physicians, nurses and staff from the same sex. The separate wards were further divided into contagious disease, non-contagious disease, eye disease, medicine, surgery and mental disease (isolated by iron bars). A Bimaristan also served as a center for medical exchanges and as a medical school to educate and to train students. For the first time in history, licensing exams were required and only qualified physicians were allowed to practice medicine. Not only for the physical treatments, but also for the mental treatments.
Bimaristan in Damascus
Psychology in Medieval Islam became, after a while, a separate branch of medicine. The first mental hospitals were established in Baghdad, Aleppo, Cordoba, Fes, Kairouan, Cairo and Istanbul. Western travelers who visited the Muslim world in the 12th century described the therapeutic methods the Muslim psychologists used, the relaxing atmosphere and how the Muslims treated their patients in these therapeutic centers. These centers were equipped with all the necessary means to provide the necessary treatment methods and additional facilities in order to complete the treatment process. Muslim clinicians used various treatments, such as the classical forms of psychotherapy, massages, medication made from plants, mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral therapy, Quran-therapy, music therapy, poetry, occupational therapy, bath therapy, aromatherapy, dancing, theater, storytellers, playing different sports and careful attention to diet.
Every patient was assisted by 2 helpers. Patients with insomnia, for example, were placed in special rooms and were accompanied by professional storytellers to help them fall asleep quietly.
During the reign of the Seljuks, and later the Ottomans, many “healing societies” were built around the mosques. They called it the “Takaya”, which lasted for centuries and are very similar to the newly established mental health centers in the USA.
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AAfter all this time, there are still things we don’t talk about. It’s a century and a half after Emancipation and a year before the election of America’s first black president. This is October 2007.
The door is closed. There is a black woman at the front of the room, near the blackboard. She is facing a black man who is sitting down and talking fast. He keeps talking for a long time, as if he has been waiting a while to say this to someone. The police, but not only the police, treated him like he was a criminal. His parents, who are white, didn’t believe him when he told them this, or if they wanted to believe him, they still just didn’t know what to say. Why would they? They were adopting a black child, they thought—not a black teenager, not a black man.
When he finishes, there is quiet in the room, as if everyone is giving him his due. A young Korean woman goes next. She says she has tried to find her birth mother, but the Korean authorities have stopped her. She says she is working to end all adoption from Korea.
There is a young Korean man. He is gay. He is also transgender. He grew up in a white Christian family in a white Christian town. He had to escape. For a long time, he didn’t talk about it. He knows he should be grateful, but here, among like-minded peers, he feels like he can really talk about it for the first time.
This workshop is called “Race and Transracial Adoption Workshop with Lisa Marie Rollins.” Rollins is the black woman at the front of the room. She says that a social worker labeled her Mexican, Filipino, and Caucasian because people didn’t want black kids. But she looked more and more black as she grew older. Her parents still said she wasn’t black. She was. Finally, they admitted it too. Then once, as an adult, visiting home, she found a mammy doll in her mother’s kitchen, in among the other knickknacks. That’s the end of the anecdote. She’s still basically speechless about it.
She says it is time to watch a video called “Struggle for Identity.” In the video, people tell their stories, stories like the ones in the room. A black woman who was adopted by white parents boils it down: “Don’t think you can make black friends after you adopt a black child. If you don’t already have black friends, you shouldn’t be adopting a black child.” Then the lights go up. There are several white people in the room who have said they have already adopted black or Asian or Guatemalan children, or that they are right now waiting to leave for Ethiopia to pick up their adopted children. All of those people—the white people—are crying.
They are crying because they have heard things they did not want to hear. But there is more to it than that. They are also crying because they do not know how else to respond to the great, big cultural silence that has been broken here.
I t would be easier for white people if race did not exist. Or if everyone could agree that race did not matter, that is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “transracial” first appeared publicly in a 1971 Time magazine article. The article introduced transracial adoption, or adoption across racial boundaries—most often white parents adopting children of color—and reported a strange phenomenon. According to a study in Britain, some white parents “tended to ‘deny their child’s color, or to say he was growing lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted [by the parents] only after the very light child had grown noticeably darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday.'”
It’s such an outrageous finding that it sounds like a joke. Stephen Colbert’s dimwitted white-guy alter ego has a joke like this, when he says on The Colbert Report, always in the most ridiculous of situations: “As you know, I don’t see color.” The joke is funny because in so many ways it’s true. Plenty of white people don’t see color. We refuse to look at it, prefer not to see too much difference, because difference almost always makes us feel bad by comparison.
Transracial adoption is awkward to discuss at first, because although it is designed to chart a radically integrated future, on the surface its structure repeats the segregated past. Just look at the basic structure of a family and apply race to the equation. The most crude way to put it: Whites are in charge, children of color are subordinate, and adults of color are out of the picture. And that’s not even talking about class.
And yet there are more of these families now than ever. The exact number of transracial adoptees in this country is unknown, but the practice, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has been on the rise for at least 10 years. Twenty-six percent of black children adopted from foster care in 2004—about 4,200 kids—were adopted transracially, almost all by white parents, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and the Department of Health and Human Services. That figure is up from 14 percent in 1998 and, according to adoption experts, it has continued to climb. The 2000 census, the first to collect information on adoptions, counted just over 16,000 white households with adopted black children. In the last 15 years, Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas, but that trend is cooling off, partly because international adoptions are so expensive.
In spite of all that, a person has to slog through layers of silence just to meet someone else at the surface for a conversation about the topic. When Mark Riding, a black father in Baltimore, burst out last November on an NPR blog with a long narrative he’d clearly been waiting to tell someone—about adopting a white daughter, getting glares on the street, and trying to censor his own family’s talk about “white people” at home—he found himself in a debate with another commenter, who told him repeatedly to “rise above the race issue” and talked about “membership in the human race.” There’s a silencer in every conversation about race.
But anonymous commenters can be great sources of information, because they’ll write what they’d never say. On The Stranger’s blog, I wrote about the woman at the workshop who said you shouldn’t adopt black children if you don’t already have black friends. An adoptive parent named Teresa took serious offense. Biological parents don’t even get screened, she wrote. “My husband and I are white, and we adopted a 9-year-old Hispanic boy four years ago. The amount of training and inspection that we went through was incredible…. You don’t know the whole story. You can’t possibly. You aren’t part of those families.”
“P.S.,” she wrote at the end, “It isn’t that hard to get a white person to cry.”
Teresa’s comment was long, and it built to a climax before the P.S. Her point: If you don’t silence these disgruntled adopted adults, then adoption policy could become race-conscious, and if adoption policy becomes race-conscious but white people still mostly aren’t, then white people could be denied the right to adopt, and if that happens, then children of color are going to go without good, permanent homes.
Don’t talk is the idea—it can’t lead to anything good. All it leads to is shouting, and suing, and then, finally, resilencing.
B arack Obama may as well have been a transracial adoptee.
He grew up with white grandparents, without black role models. His Kenyan father and his Kansas mother were not constant presences. As an upperclassman in high school, he realized what it meant to be black in a white world and became sick with the particular loneliness of a transracial adoptee. His grades dropped, he smoked pot, he snorted coke, he came close to trying heroin with an acquaintance in a meat locker: In short, he nearly destroyed himself. To his family, he simply fell silent. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” So they didn’t talk about it.
In the world of transracial adoption, you don’t have to look very hard to figure out why no one talks about this stuff. Federal adoption laws mandate silence. Social workers aren’t allowed to talk to families about whether they already have black friends. They aren’t allowed to tell families they might want to get some. Any of that would be seen, according to federal law written in 1996, as a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1996 law prohibits the placement of an adoptee on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Race does not matter, the law says. The American domestic child-welfare system is officially colorblind—or, more to the point, colormute.
There’s one exception: The law doesn’t apply to Native American children. A separate 1978 law governs them and says the opposite: that in-race adoptions are preferred. Both laws were written by people who said they had the best interests of the children in mind. Yet today, as a report released this past May by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute shows, Native American and black kids—despite being governed by philosophically opposite laws—both on average stay in the child-welfare system longer than children of any other race. Why are these kids still stranded? If one way of helping minority foster children doesn’t work, and the opposite way of helping minority foster children doesn’t work either, why are we still pretending one is right and one is wrong?
A doption has never been simple for adoptees, and increasingly, adoptive parents are learning that making life easier for their children may make it more complicated for them. Today, many parents acknowledge absent birth parents—always present to the adoptee—as a presence in their families too. For a transracial adoptee, race is like another missing parent. In fact, transracial adoptees hunger for heritage at a younger age than their white counterparts, searching for their parents on average five years earlier (25.8 versus 31.2), and looking not just for parents but also for a racial identity.
We know this because of a study cited in the 2006 anthology Outsiders Within, which is the first book ever to be written entirely by transracial adoptees and to include academic research, scholarly papers, memoirs, and artworks. It’s a landmark book representing a new voice, or an old voice finally speaking up. Why did it take so long? Gratefulness. Gratefulness is the most powerful silencer in the adoption world. Even if a transracial adoptee breaks the silence to make a criticism about his or her experience, the immediate response always is: Would it have been better if you’d never been adopted? It’s a rhetorical cul-de-sac, a false runaround that continues to stifle conversations about more complicated subjects, like what’s the difference between a family that’s tolerant and one that’s actively antiracist, or why are there so many children of color adopted in the first place?
That old stifling question is starting to die.
These are the voices that are coming out instead:
“I can’t be alone in thinking that being transracially adopted, we have lost something: lost our languages, traditions, cultures, and most importantly the subtleties and nuances of those cultures. We have lost something we never had, which we may not have even valued had we had it, and yet we continue to mourn. Am I alone in this grief?”
That’s M. Anderson, writing in Outsiders Within. Here’s Rita Simon, a researcher at American University who has been studying transracial adoption since 1968 (she’s talking on NPR):
“What we find consistently is that the white families cannot raise a black child as if it was its own birth child. They have to make changes in their lives. In other words, love is not enough.”
And this from the Donaldson report this past May:
“Two principles provide a solid framework for meeting the needs of black children and youth in foster care: that adoption is a service for children, and that acknowledgement of race-related realities—not ‘colorblindness’—must help to shape the development of sound adoption practices.” (Emphasis mine.)
The Donaldson report, commissioned by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, calls for a change to federal adoption law.
P am Hansen, a Seattle pediatrician—her last name has been changed for privacy reasons—is in her kitchen making black-bean burritos for dinner. “My white friends don’t really get it when I say this, but I basically have these kids because of poverty,” she says.
Her willingness to talk openly is surprising; I find myself wanting to silence her for her own protection.
Pam and her husband, Bill, both white, adopted two black children, Theo and Simone, whose mother, Amanda, lives in Texas. Amanda had to give them up because she’s poor and has been dealing with illness in her immediate family. The semi-open adoptions cost almost $20,000 each. “Some of my white friends think there’s something wrong with the birth mother for giving up her kids. Okay, she could have used contraception, but not everyone I know is perfect in that way either. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s important that my kids know that. I’ve thought before, what if I’d just given that money to her?”
In international adoptions, the poverty of the parents is usually blamed on corrupt governments or bad political situations, Pam says. “But when it’s domestic, we blame the parents.”
The Transracially Adopted Children’s Bill of Rights, by adoptee Liza Steinberg Triggs, includes this rule: “Every child is entitled to parents who know that if they are white they experience the benefits of racism because the country’s system is organized that way.”
Pam is the sort of person—maybe all self-critical parents (people?) are this way out of necessity—who can’t help but believe in opposing ideas. She and her husband, who studied black history in graduate school, were interested in adopting black children “from a social-justice point of view.” Both because more black children than white children need homes, and because the Hansens believe in the civil-rights dream of an understanding and connection between different races of people.
A year ago, they moved from the lily-white Proctor neighborhood in Tacoma to the racial mix of Columbia City, and Theo, now in kindergarten, goes to a public school in Rainier Valley, where the Hansens are hoping to meet and befriend black families. (They want not only black peers but black role models for their kids.) Their adoption agency gave them a few tips about respecting black culture and sent them on their way. “It’s not enough,” she says. “Honestly, we could have gone and moved to a white gated community in northern Minnesota, and nobody would have done anything about it.”
Some days, Pam does feel like moving to a white neighborhood, not that she would. Several months ago, on a bus in Columbia City, a young black man asked her whether her kids were adopted. She said yes. He chanted, “That’s fucked up, that’s fucked up.” Then he told her that when her son got older, he’d get up in the middle of the night and kill her, so maybe the man would just kill her now, there on the bus. Another time, a black woman in a car yelled at Pam and the kids when they were walking on the street in Columbia City: “How does it feel to steal black babies, you white bitch?”
There are times when black parents or grandparents smile at her knowingly, or randomly hug her, or give her unsolicited help, but usually she feels nervous around black parents. “I feel that I need to do it right,” she says. “I need to prove that I’m capable of parenting these children.”
She gives herself only middling marks. Neither she nor Bill have close black friends yet. And they aren’t Christians, so they can’t join a black church. “It’s complicated,” she says. “It’s only going to get harder as they get older. I think you have to be willing to talk about it constantly, and over and over.”
I ‘m a moderate racist.
My personal data “suggest a moderate automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans.” This data came from something called the Implicit Association Test, which is hosted on the website of Harvard University. The test, developed in 1998, is intended to gauge unconscious bias. It measures how long you take to answer questions (by keyboard) that ask you to associate faces of different races with good (e.g., “joy”) versus bad (e.g., “failure”) words.
This is the test that King County employees of the state’s Children’s Administration department are going to be taking, because Washington has a problem. It’s the same problem pretty much everywhere around the country, and not a new problem either: Too many kids of color are coming into foster care and staying in too long. In King County, the Children’s Administration is writing a plan with five parts, one of which is “staff development, which begins with self-examination,” says director Joel Odimba. “We’re going to train in knowing who we are.” The five-point plan includes—in addition to soul searching—a review of policies, the formation of an advisory committee, and a possible Cultural Competency Center.
Those are pretty quiet, bureaucracy-as-usual ideas compared to the idea that made Seattle famous on this issue. In 1999, Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services launched a pilot project that four years later became the full-blown Office of African-American Children’s Services (OAACS, pronounced “oasis”). It was staffed with people trained to handle the particular issues of black foster kids, and most of the county’s black kids were routed through it—blatantly defying the colorblind mandates of federal adoption law. Quickly, it was the talk of the nation, a test of dealing with race head-on in public policy, as if it matters. And it was invented out of a sense of desperation not uncommon around the country: In 2004, while black children made up 7 percent of the population of King County’s kids, they accounted for 30 percent of the kids in King County foster care.
It was a stab, an effort, a start. But it got complaints. Its management turned over often, and it was criticized by the rest of the department. Last spring, just as OACCS’s approach was about to be validated by new research—two months later, the Donaldson report would call for an emphasis on race in the child-welfare system—OACCS was killed. The federal Office of Civil Rights declared it in violation, and the state decided to let it go. The state’s foster-care administration would no longer deal with race in a direct way. Meanwhile, the OAACS building would be renamed the Martin Luther King Jr. office—an apt linguistic elision. Now it operates like all the others, taking cases on the basis of where the kids live. You’d never know that a major experiment on the role of race in families went on there, and whatever it might have been on its way to learning appears to have been lost.
T here are not that many movies about domestic transracial adoption. In one, the 1995 movie Losing Isaiah, Halle Berry stars as a crackhead named Khaila who leaves her baby, Isaiah, in a trash can while she goes to find some crack. He’s discovered, taken to a hospital, and adopted by Jessica Lange’s character, Margaret. When Khaila cleans up and discovers her son is still alive, she wants him back, and a judge orders his return. But it is too late—the toddler is attached to Margaret, and he doesn’t respond to Khaila. Khaila is forced to admit that Margaret has become her son’s mother. The last scene shows Margaret and Isaiah reunited over some toys, and Khaila playing alongside them. A title card flashes: “And a little child shall lead them, Isaiah 11:6.”
A little child shall lead them.
That phrase hits me hard. One of the reasons I was at that October 2007 workshop (at Seattle University), and that I’d been looking into transracial adoption, was to teach racist family members of mine a lesson. I had other reasons too—I’ve been debating whether to become a parent for a while—but this one was the most embarrassing. In my fantasy, I hadn’t considered how exactly I would protect my child. The child was a means to an end, a healing agent: Want to rid your parents of their overt racism? Give them black grandchildren and defy them not to love them! Need to atone for your own covert racism? Adopt a black child and let him teach you!
Part of the genuine appeal of transracial adoption, it’s true, is its potential to transform our culture. “I often think about transracial adoption as a grand social experiment,” writes John Raible, one of the first mixed-race children adopted to a white family in the 1960s and something of a spokesperson on the topic.
Even so, children shouldn’t be the day laborers on the job, says Chad Goller-Sojourner. Would you want your children to be the test cases in a grand social experiment?
“What I’d ask parents is, are you willing to be the uncomfortable one?” Goller-Sojourner says. This is how he’d question a prospective parent if he were a social worker. “Because somebody’s gonna be uncomfortable, and it seems the burden is on you. You have to be the uncomfortable one.”
He means that if white parents of black children, for instance, don’t live in black neighborhoods, join black churches, have black friends, and send their children to significantly mixed-race schools, then at least they should cross the thresholds into black barbershops even though it’s awkward, or drive out of their way to shop at grocery stores in black neighborhoods. Parents should be careful to raise their children to live in this world, not the one they wish existed.
“If you’re buying a house and you have a dog, don’t you spend more time looking for a big old yard for your dog?” he says. “Love is but one of many components of parenting. You’re raising children to live in a world that may not be your world. If you go to the pound, they won’t just give you a dog. There are rules. They’ll say, ‘That dog’s not good for your house, we’ll get you another dog.’ But when you ask that question about kids, people freak out.”
Goller-Sojourner is a performer. This summer, he put on a one-man show at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center called Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy. As a big, gay, dark-skinned black adoptee of white parents living in white University Place outside Tacoma, he has had to explain himself many times, from many different perspectives, to many different kinds of people. He’s developed multiple metaphors: the dog-adoption analogy, one involving a seven-foot child with five-foot parents (“It’s not that one’s better, it’s just an acknowledgement of likeness or nonlikeness”), and one about lions and a gazelle.
“Let’s say I was a gazelle adopted by lions,” he says. “I pranced around happy until I got to first grade and all these lions tried to attack me; it’s like they didn’t get the memo. The other gazelles, they smelled the lion on me and didn’t trust me, so I stood open.”
He can also tell it literally: “The difference between when I got called nigger and when other black kids got called nigger is that they went home and got love, and I went home and got love from people who looked just like the people who called me nigger. As a child, you don’t have the ability to bifurcate.”
P hebe Jewell is gay. She and her partner, Dawn, adopted a boy named Isaac. He has the same mother as Bill and Pam Hansen’s two children, the poor woman from Texas, Amanda, who for the most part finds it too painful to be in contact with the children she’s let go. Isaac, Theo, and Simone all live in the same neighborhood, and Theo and Isaac go to the same school (Simone is too young). When friends from school come over, they are often confused about why Isaac, Theo, and Simone don’t live together. But then somebody explains it, and that’s that.
Isaac is 6 1/2, the oldest of the three, and he is not a quiet kid. You can hear him across the aisles at a store. Phebe worries that some people will see him as “dangerous, a thug,” but she knows that if he were quiet, he’d probably get teased as an Oreo. At his school, many of the kids are black. He comes home talking black, calling her “girl.” It makes her proud, that he’s getting black culture, black cadence. Even though she’s white, she knows it herself, having grown up partly in the South. She jokingly calls him “boy” in return, but she knows she’ll eventually have to stop herself, because of that word’s old association with power and slavery, something Isaac couldn’t know about now.
Isaac does know about slavery. He learned about it a year ago. Eventually, he used it against his mother when she tried to tell him what to do. “White people don’t own black people anymore, so you can’t own me,” he told her.
Ingenious, she thought. That’s my son.
O ver at Theo and Simone’s house, they have just finished eating their black-bean burritos, and it’s time to put on swimsuits and get in the car to go for lessons. Lessons are at Medgar Evers Pool, a place named for a man who was intimidated from voting just 62 years ago, who was on his college debate team, who married a woman named Myrlie, who had a Molotov cocktail thrown into the carport at their home, who was nearly run down by a car, who was shot dead in his own driveway—in the back—by a Ku Klux Klan fertilizer salesman who was not convicted of murder until 30 years later. Everything good that happened to Medgar Evers was because of Medgar Evers. Everything bad that happened to him was because he was black and refused to apologize for it.
Theo and Simone are sitting in the backseat of the car. Pam is explaining how she dresses the children carefully. If they were white children, she might dress them as “little Goodwill hippies,” but she doesn’t want black or white people thinking of them as poor maltreated urchins, so she dresses them up. Theo is wearing a white button-up polo shirt and glasses. We are driving past Garfield High School, where on Halloween night, a black teenager was killed in what police think was a gang shooting. Since then, black teenagers have been walking around the Central District and riding city buses along Martin Luther King Jr. Way in sweatshirts that say “RIP Lil Q” for the kid who died.
Theo doesn’t know any of this. He doesn’t know that he’s going to a pool named for Medgar Evers. He doesn’t know that there was a shooting here at this same place, another shooting of a black man. He doesn’t know that this is my neighborhood, where I live, where I’m learning about the meaning of race, the moderate racist in the front seat.
He does know about Obama, though. What does he know about Obama? I ask him. He puts his fingers to his chest and says, “Black.” Then he says, “White House.” That’s all he says. recommended
Recent research tested if White Americans implicitly dehumanize Black Americans.
If scientists want to find cures for medical diseases/illnesses, they need to first understand the causes of the diseases/illnesses. This requires a deep understanding of both the human body and chemistry. And this can only be obtained through scientific research.
The same thing applies to social problems, such as the prejudice and dehumanization that can exist between various groups. If these social problems are to be alleviated, researchers must uncover them. There is simply no way to do so otherwise. It wold be akin to trying to cure malaria, without knowing what malaria is, or that it even exists.
Thus, although research uncovering racism, sexism and other negative social problems is often unpleasant (and rightfully so), it is necessary and important.
Phillip Goff, a psychologist at Penn State University, and colleagues recently tested Americans implicit associations between Black people and apes. Implicit associations (as opposed to conscious, explicit associations) are largely unconscious. As such, they are arguably well suited to measure people’s true attitudes, as opposed to what they tell you when you explicitly ask them. (This does not mean, however, that they cannot be changed, although the research addressing this issue is just now emerging).
In one study, these researchers subliminally primed participants with White or Black faces. The task for the participants was to correctly identify the images they later saw as quickly as possible. All participants were then shown an image of an ape, that became progressively more clear with each passing image.
When primed with Black faces, participants took fewer slides to correctly identify the image as an Ape. This suggests that the Black faces increased the cognitive accessibility (the thought level) of apes, which suggests that people associate Black people with apes.
In a second study, these researchers examined historical documents of executions. They found that Black defendents were more likely to have animal words used to describe them. And further, the more animal words were used to describe the criminals in these trials, the more likely the person was to be executed.
This isn’t to say that if you asked people if they associate apes with Black people, that they would know this about themselves. Like I said, these are implicit associations that are outside of consciousness.
These implicit associations are of consequence, however. For instance, research shows that primes that people are not aware of exert a huge influence on behavior (e.g., implicit aggression primes, for instance, increase aggression).
So, although no one would probably say they think Black people are ape-like, research shows that, at an implicit (but important) level, people do think just that.
Perhaps, findings like this, by uncovering such dehumanization, can aid in the future reduction of racial conflict.
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.
— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15
Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.
— John Locke, “Second Treatise”
By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.
— Anonymous, 1861
I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”
I Thought I Was White: On Coming to Terms with Racial Realities
Posted by Electra Telesford | Labels: black feminism, ElectraTelesford, Inequality, journalism, multiculturalism, post-grad, Post-racial, race, society
I have often been asked ‘Do you think you’re white?’. This is usually a weak reference to my demeanor, which can be misinterpreted as ‘haughty’ on one end of the spectrum, and ‘refined’ on the better end. I stopped entertaining the question long ago, it is blatantly foolish and problematic. However, yes! In some ways I did think I was “white”- just not in the way the questioners thought.
I grew up during the “multi-cultural” 1990s. I remember my school having a Chinese New Year Celebration and discussing holidays such as Rosh Hashanah in class although we did not have any Chinese-American or Jewish students. Multiculturalism is often a structured way of celebrating certain cultural aspects of the other. The idea that we live in a society that does not just tolerate cultural differences but embraces them has lead many people to think that our country is ‘post-racial’. How often have you heard the following:
We have a black president, right?
There are so many interracial couples!
My best-friend is Black!
It would be a failure to not acknowledge the developments that have occurred in our society. Leaders and impassioned citizens alike have made conscious effort to progress towards tolerance and equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It is easy to believe that the playing field is level when it is not. I repeat, it is not .
Inequality is more insidious than it was before; Blacks are allowed to vote, minorities can sit on any part of the bus, schools are integrated(or it is illegal for them to be segregated), and as a result inequality does not transpire in the old ways. Or, not as often as before. However, a person of color who believes that we live in a “post-racial” and multi-cultural society is in danger.
If they are not aware that they are disenfranchised, they can make no distinction between themselves, and someone who has advantages. Unaware of these advantages, they believe themselves similarly advantaged, and as a result they will be dismayed by their differing results. It’s like blaming yourself for losing a one mile race, unaware that your competitor was given a 10 minute head start.
Many minorities believe the myth of the “post-racial society” that tells them that their race is inconsequential to their lives. The theoretical is continuously contradicted, but it still permeates many of our understandings of race.
It causes individuals to find themselves entirely responsible for issues that are compounded by institutionalized racism. That was me. I have only recently been able to recognize White Privilege for what it is: not what whites are given, but what is withheld from People of Color. This inability to see caused me to hold myself responsible for situations that were largely out of my control. For example, I blamed myself for not getting the scores to enter a specialized High School. The constructive question is this: Why was the school in my black neighborhood sub-par? Those at the sharp end of inequality often cannot recognize it.
Did I think I was white? No, not really. I thought that the hegemonic hold of ‘whiteness’ has been alleviated by years of activism and social change. I’ve had a difficult time reconciling myself to this insight.
It somehow felt more appropriate to blame my follies entirely on my shortcomings rather than a system that is set up for failure. If we ever intend on fixing the system that is in place, we must not be complicit in allowing it to continue; instead we must showcase it as the cruel unjust mechanism that it is.
An open letter to privileged people who play devil’s advocate
By JULIANA | Published: MAY 30, 2014
Image Credit: Huffington Post
You know who you are. You are that white guy in an Ethnic Studies class who’s exploring the idea that poor people might have babies to stay on welfare. Or some person arguing over drinks that maybe a lot of women do fake rape for attention. Or, recently, someone insisting that I consider the idea that Elliot Rodger could have been a madman and an anomaly, not at all a product of a white supremacist and misogynistic society.
Most of the time, it’s clear that you actually believe the arguments you claim to have just for the heck of it. However, you know that these beliefs are unpopular, largely because they make you sound selfish and privileged, so you blame them on the “devil.” Here’s the thing: the devil doesn’t need any more advocates. He’s got plenty of power without you helping him.
These discussions may feel like “playing” to you, but to many people in the room, it’s their lives you are “playing” with. The reason it feels like a game to you is because these are issues that probably do not directly affect you. It doesn’t matter whether most mass shootings are targeted at women who rejected the gunman if you are a man – though it should, since misogyny kills men too. If you are white, it doesn’t matter whether people of color are being racially profiled or not. You can attach puppet strings to dialogues about real issues because at the end of the day, you can walk away from the tangled mess you’ve exacerbated.
To be fair, there are many privileged devil’s advocates out there who are truly trying to figure things out. I know people who think best out loud, throwing ideas at me to see which sticks to their “friendly neighborhood feminist.” Your kind like to come at a concept from every angle before deciding what you think. You ask those of us who are knowledgeable on the subject to explain it to you again and again because in this world it is harder for you to believe that maybe the deck is stacked in your favor than to think of us as lazy, whining, or liars.
Purple Boots, Silver Stars … and White ParentsBy FRANK LIGTVOETPublished: October 13, 2013
“WHEN I wear my cap backwards, don’t copy me,” our 8-year-old son says to his 7-year-old sister. “O.K.,” she answers, “I will put it on sideways.”Enlarge This Image Joohee YoonConnect With Us on TwitterFor Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.Readers’ CommentsReaders shared their thoughts on this article.
Recently our African-American daughter, Rosa, had gone with an older black friend to Fulton Mall, a crowded commercial area in our Brooklyn neighborhood, where the shoppers are mostly black. Fulton Mall is not only about shopping, it’s also a place to flirt, talk, laugh and argue, and to listen in passing to gospel, soul, hip-hop and R & B.Rosa had seen some purple canvas boots with silver stars and lost herself in an all-consuming desire to have them. Immediately. I bought them, a bit later. A day later. And to be “fair,” I bought our son, Joshua, who is also African-American, a pair of black and yellow basketball shorts. Pretty cool as well.The next day they want to show off their new stuff and, somewhat to my surprise, they decide to do so at Fulton Mall. I am their white adoptive dad, and by now, at their age, they see the racial difference between us clearly and are not always comfortable with it in public. But they know they are too young to go alone to the mall. Before we leave, Rosa, who had always seemed indifferent to fashion, changes into tight jeans and a black short-sleeve T-shirt. Joshua twists his head to see how he looks from behind. He pushes his new shorts a bit lower over his hips, but doesn’t dare to go all the way saggy. And then — after they have their cap conversation — we go.They walk ahead. I am kept at a distance, a distance that grows as we get closer to the mall. I respect that; I grin and play stranger. (click link below to read rest of article)
Looking east across Boerum Street at Fulton Street Mall by David Shankbone, Brooklyn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Scars of a whipped slave (April 2, 1863, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. Original caption: “Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer. The very words of poor Peter, taken as he sat for his picture.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
400 Years a Slave 9 November 2013
After weeks of anticipation, I finally saw the movie 12 Years a Slave.In trying to unpack my thoughts, the one thing I do not want to do is review the film. Others will do that far more adeptly than I. Suffice it to say, the film was STUNNING — in every sense of the word, at all possible levels.As an African American genealogist, I am more informed than most about the history of African American people and our subjugation to slavery in the Americas. From my personal family tree, I can name 12 ancestors whose humanity was violated. And that is just the “top note” as I know there are others whose names will never be found.For the past 30+ years, I have been on a mission to bring their stories to light — not just for my own edification, but for public exposure. It was thus that I created Our Black Ancestry for the purpose of “empowering our future by honoring our past.”Every name I learn, every document I uncover, every story I reveal … all of it constitutes a mere fragment in the worldwide complicity of economic aspiration that resulted in a heinous crime against humanity. It is a crime that has never been fully addressed, punished or resolved. White Americans relegate this past to the fond digression of films like Gone with the Wind. African Americans often refuse to look back, perhaps in an attempt to control the antipathy that surely must reside in our wounded souls.The powerful essence of the movie was that it encapsulated a visual depiction of the words I read in books and documents.As I witnessed the unfolding story of Solomon Northup, I was mentally transported into a cotton field where my great grandparents toiled without relief in Lowndes County, Alabama.I lay in the bed of my great grandmother in Noxubee County, Mississippi as she succumbed to sexual objectification by the man who fathered her 17 children — thus being elevated over a 10 year span from “farmhand” to “housekeeper.”I experienced the anguish of an inconsolable mother whose cries for her stolen children were so overwhelmingly rife with anguish, her fellow slave retorted that she “stop wailing.” She then endured further punishment by being sold away by an owner who refused to entertain the unconscionable pain he had caused.As Northup was hung by the neck and left dangling in desperation, I envisioned my uncle who was lynched.I shared the pathos of generations of people — my people — kidnapped, chained, whipped, crippled, violated and traumatized in every possible way. Slave masters reduced themselves and their prey to a level of barbarity that defies imagination, unleashing a vicious cycle of violence that informs our society unto this very day. I cannot fathom the cognitive dissonance of these men and their consort wives who did what they did and justified it with the word of a God I do not know.In the end, as Northup climbed into the wagon of his rescuers, all he could do was gaze with sadness and longing at the ones he left behind. In the final analysis, it was they who were the most tragic of victims because their subjugation was never to be relieved. Sixty years removed from the only relative I knew in person who was enslaved — my father’s grandmother — I am limited to a vicarious awareness of what she and my other family members endured. There is no doubt in my mind… I would NOT have survived. Yet, I am grateful they did because, if not for them, I would not BE.
English: Children at a mission in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic Italiano: Missione genovese del Guaricano – Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — In a school auditorium filled with laughing students, actresses Luz Bautista Matos and Clara Morel threw themselves into acting out a fairy tale complete with a princess, a hero and acts of derring-do.
Morel had wrapped a white plastic sheet around her multi-colored blouse, while Bautista donned a brown paper bag over her blue tights. The two black actresses wore their hair free and natural, decorated only with single pink flowers.
“Yes, you’re a princess,” said Bautista to Morel, who fretted that she didn’t look like a traditional princess with her dark complexion and hair. Bautista then turned to a young girl sitting in the front row, who shared the same African-descended features as both actresses. “And you too,” Morel said as the child smiled back at her.
The theater group Wonderful Tree has visited schools all over Santo Domingo and some in the countryside to spread the word among black children that their features and heritage should be a source of pride. That message, though simple, has been nothing less than startling in this Caribbean country, where 80 percent of people are classified as mulattos, meaning they have mixed black-white ancestry, but where many still consider being labeled black an offense.
Wonderful Tree represents a larger cultural movement that’s working to combat the country’s historic bias through arts and education. The Dominican choreographer Awilda Polanco runs a contemporary dance company that’s trying to rescue Afro-Caribbean traditions, while the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo has been training primary school teachers to respect and celebrate their students’ African heritage, including through skits that young children can more easily understand.
It’s a bid to transform a color-obsessed society where a majority of the country’s 10 million people choose to identify themselves as “Indio” — or “Indian” — on government documents despite their black roots, and many reject afros in favor of closely cropped hair or sleek blowouts. Public schools for decades even prohibited students from attending classes with their hair loose or in a natural frizz.
Such hair, in fact, is called “bad hair” in the local Spanish lexicon while straightened hair is “good hair.”
The Dominican population “has tried to disconnect itself from its African roots to the point where they’ve constituted a community that’s mostly mixed” but calls itself “indios,” wrote historian Frank Moya Ponsin in the prologue of the book “Good Hair, Bad Hair.”
In her school presentations, Morel flaunts her own natural looks as a point of pride. At one point in the play, Morel clutches a mask featuring straight black hair only to pull it away and reveal her dark brown kinky curls.
“This should be a source of pride because your color, your skin, your hair is an inheritance,” Morel told the children at the Albergue Educativo Infantil school in the town of Moca. “It’s the legacy of your parents, it’s the legacy of your grandparents.”
Morel said students have long been bullied and even attacked for their hair, while public schools have re-enforced the prejudice by cracking down on children sporting natural African hair, defending the measures as prevention against lice outbreaks.
“If it was only a health issue, it’d be fine, but children think there’s something bad about their features,” Morel said.
Maria Cosme, a Santo Domingo housewife, recalled the day she sent her young daughter to school with loose curly hair and a ribbon around her head. Teachers quickly tied up her daughter’s hair and warned it should remain that way if she wanted to attend classes, Cosme recalled.
“It’s a matter of racism, but also protocol,” said Cosme, who has straightened her daughter’s hair since age 4. She is now 7 years old.
Elizabeth Veloz, a graphic designer who always wore her hair natural, said the human resources director of her former company criticized her hair shortly before she was fired.
“He told me that curly hair is not proper hair, that it’s beach hair,” she said. “But the worst part is that he’s black, like me, and he cuts his hair really short because it’s kinky.”
Not everyone sees the hair issue in racial terms.
Hair stylist Yoly Reyes said she’s been relaxing her hair since she was 15.
“I am black and that will not change if I straighten my hair. But I think I look prettier with straight hair,” she said. “When have you ever seen (President Barack) Obama’s wife with kinky hair? I don’t think she straightens it to stop being black.”
Women in the Dominican Republic spend an estimated 12 percent of their household budgets on hair salons and treatments, according to “Good Hair, Bad Hair,” which included an economic and anthropological study of Dominican beauty salons.
Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who oversaw the killing of some 17,000 Haitians in 1937 in an effort to expel them from the Dominican Republic, was himself a mulatto who used makeup to make his face lighter.
Trujillo was the first to include the term “Indio” in official documents, said historian Emilio Cordero Michel.
Yet U.N. officials noted in a 2013 report that “Indian” identifiers don’t accurately reflect the country’s ethnicity and expressed concern about the country’s denial of racism. The government’s migration director, Jose Ricardo Taveras, has repeated such denials, insisting any racism is isolated.
It’s a claim that many reject, including Desiree del Rosario, coordinator of the Center for Gender Studies who runs the technological institute’s teacher training program.
Del Rosario said the country’s racism was tied to its troubled relationship with neighboring Haiti, where the population is darker-complexioned and where African culture holds a prominent place in society. Del Rosario summed up the common Dominican mentality as “The Haitians are black, and we, white.”
For Bautista and Morel, however, change is coming one child at a time. After one typically spirited, even goofy show, a dark-complexioned boy with his hair shaved close to his scalp approached Morel.
“I want to be part of your group,” the boy told the two women. “I want to be an Afro-descendent.”
You’re Not Alone: Emotional Health and the Black Graduate Student
Posted by For Harriet | Labels: graduate school, higher education, racism
by Nana Brantuo
Sitting in class after a long day of teaching and data entry, my mind drifted away for the discussion at hand. Events from the day played over and over in my head. Earlier in the day, the class I TA reviewed Donald Murray’s case against the University of Maryland (Pearson v. Murray, 1936). Out of nowhere, he raised his hand, Mr. White Privilege/Future Leader of America. Without a care in the world, he attempted justifying segregation – referring to it as “unfortunate” but necessary to maintain financial sponsors of the institution (some of his white peers nodding their heads in agreement). By the time my evening course began, I was still upset. Was this the life I planned on, teaching privileged white kids who had no interest in the lives of experiences of people of color? I wasn’t interested in hearing my classmates reflect on years of teaching Black and Brown children (stories that I label as The White Savior Chronicles). I was fed up with their eyes staring at me when discussions shifted to diversity and equity, sorry attempts at soliciting the Black woman to speak. Familiar feelings of doubt and depression consumed me and quickly shifted to feelings of sadness.
What was I doing here? Why does it feel as though I have to build a case, a defense for the education of Black and Brown children in a country that prides itself on democracy, liberty, and justice? Instead of bottling in these feelings, I turned to social media to disclose my feelings. My status read, “Are periods of sadness common among graduate students along with feelings of doubt?” After a few minutes I began seeing responses.
“I thought I was the only one.”
“Girl yes!”
“Yes, but keep moving…”
“Yes, You have to find balance otherwise this mess will consume you…”
I was not alone. I was not the only one. This outpour of understanding and support helped me realize how unhealthy the graduate school process can be without proper self-care, self-love, and foresight for the future ahead. I had been avoiding address the stress and anxiety that had consumed me, sometimes to the point of physical illness. I would have anxiety attacks in private, during lunch breaks, even once during a class. At one point, my hair was thinning out. I used happy hour as a way of drinking my problems away. Why? Because I didn’t think of them as real problems with real consequences if not handled properly.
“All of the sacrifices my family and ancestors have made are much greater than these anxiety attacks.”
“Snap out of this, Black people don’t have anxiety attacks. Black people don’t get depressed.”
“You can’t let them see you sweat. You can’t let these white people see you sweat.”
These were the things I would tell myself when the pressure of graduate school began consuming me. I held on so strongly to my upbringing of sucking it up and moving along that I allowed my emotional and physical health to deteriorate. Now, I am taking the time to say, “Enough is enough!” We must take the time to address and nurture our emotional health in order to fight the battles ahead. The experiences of Black graduate students (POC graduate students in general) are filled with anxiety, stress, anger, depression, and sadness. Amid endless pages of readings, deadlines that never end, comprehensive exams, and upcoming thesis/dissertation proposals and defenses, our emotional health can take a turn for the worst. We constantly have to defend our spaces, our causes, and our communities in academic spaces that resist diversity. We push ourselves to the limit for the degrees and certifications but is that the ultimate goal? Our work and our sacrifices are not for these institutions, professors, or classmates but rather for the communities we love and our people. We must take care of ourselves holistically as we make our way through these academic journeys. Forming support groups, going to therapy, and finding outlets (i.e. writing, painting, exercising) are three among numerous steps towards creating balance in lives that are often thrown off of equilibrium by classes, coursework, and academic writing.
Our growth and increased understanding of the connection between physical, mental, and emotional health is essential to developing and uplifting our communities. Everyday I pull from the strength of generations that have come before to push on in my journey. I remind myself that I’m working for the youth, ensuring that they will have access to high quality education that is centered on their social and academic growth. I speak with close friends and trusted advisors when I feel myself consumed by feelings of doubt. I remind myself that I am the child of a race that has come so far and will continue moving forward.
Related:
Black, Poor, and Woman in Higher Education: What I Learned From Graduate School
Nana Brantuo, a Ghanaian/Sierra Leonean American, is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Minority and Urban Education program and an alumna of Howard University. Nana is the creator of The New African, a blog focused on embracing the diversity of African and African descendants. Currently, she is a content developer for an up and coming blog/magazine that focuses on Africans in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.
Mandala Psychotherapy Services: Practicing a Psychotherapy of Liberation 