The shame is not ours. That holds true of the horrors
and the trauma of the Middle Passage, and the toll it exacted on the bodies and
psyches of African people. And that applies to the continued racial
oppression, the deprivation and the economic, physical and mental violence to
which Black people are subjected every day.
While white society has told Black people that their
“problems” are of their own making, a result of their moral failures and lack
of work ethic, white America promoted this false narrative by punishing Black
folks through public policy.
What if the shame is indeed not ours? What if
neuroscience, the study of the brain, can make sense of the effect of trauma on
the very minds and behaviors of Black families, adults and children? What
if white supremacy takes its toll on the health and development of our minds,
not just in a philosophical, political or cultural sense, but from a medical
and scientific standpoint?
If the problem is one that Black people face, then
Black institutions will solve it. For the first time, two African-American
organizations — a health services agency and a fraternity — are teaming up to
address the neuroscience of poverty and the impact of trauma on the Black mind
and behavior.
The Columbus (Ohio) Area Integrated Health Services,
Inc. (CAIHS) and the Columbus Kappa Foundation, Inc. — part of the Kappa Alpha
Psi fraternity — have formed a partnership called the Global Life Chances
Initiative.
The project will provide services, education and
outreach to Black families hit the hardest by infant mortality, educational
under-performance and economic dislocation. Further, through a concept
known as the neuroscience of poverty, the initiative will address prevention
and repair of Black people traumatized and damaged by economic deprivation and
exploitation and the toll poverty has on the brain.
The concept represents a bold and innovative research
approach. Past studies have examined intergenerational trauma and post-traumatic
slave syndrome, and the ways in which the psychic damage of enslavement,
genocide and other forms of oppression can be passed down through generations.
A recent Newsweek article addressed how poverty impacts
the brain. Specifically, it said that “poverty, and the conditions that
often accompany it — violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution,
malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs — can affect the interactions,
formation and pruning of connections in the young brain.”
Anthony Penn, President/CEO of Columbus Area Integrated
Health Services, Inc. (CAIHS). Anthony Penn, President/CEO of CAIHS, told Atlanta
Black Star that by focusing on the Black community, what the initiative learns
ultimately will benefit all communities.
“This is an
important initiative for this historically African-American mental health
organization. For decades, we have witnessed clients that our agency has
provided services for suffer from trauma and issues that professionals have
found difficult to treat,” Penn told Atlanta Black Star. “When you look
at the high rate of infant mortality in Columbus, the parents that are impacted
by high infant mortality, there is a large [amount of] depression and need for
support to those families.”
Penn added that it is important for the
African-American community to move beyond these long-term issues that hold our
community back. As Nate Jordan II, President of the Columbus Kappa Foundation,
Inc. noted, the new initiative will be based in the Mount Vernon section of
Columbus, where the Kappa House is located. Jordan told Atlanta Black
Star that Mount Vernon is “one of the most economically depressed areas from
redlining. A lot of abandoned housing, all of the detrimental things are
exemplified in these housing areas.”
“In Ohio, the Black infant mortality rate is 48th in
the country. In Columbus, the Kappa House is in [an area with] one of the
highest infant mortality rates in Ohio, where there are seven hot zones” for
infant mortality, he added. Jordan noted that the Kappas became involved
in the Global Life Chances Initiative through their engagement in infant
mortality, safe sleeping issues and matters concerning Black fatherhood.
“We also looked at the father missing out of the family
unit and how the father can make a big difference from an infant mortality
standpoint…even when the baby is still in the placenta, having the father
acting from a nurturing standpoint,” he said.
Jordan also mentioned the Kappa’s Nurturing Fathers
program, an evidence-based, 13-week program in California that improves life
chances for children and puts fathers back into the lives of their
families. A group of 10-16 fathers receives services and education around
their relationships with their child, the roots of fathering, nurturing,
discipline without violence, anger management, nutrition, housing and other issues.
Nate Jordan II, President of the Columbus Kappa
Foundation, Inc. “We’re Black men showing leadership, and we already have a
tremendous following. We’re politically in position, and people are looking for
our leadership. So this is another example of the Kappas being on the front
burner, and this model we’re putting together will be going nationwide,” Jordan
noted.
For Dr. Stacy Scott, a consultant with the
National Kappa Foundation’s Healthy Kappas/Healthy Communities National Initiative says this new partnership makes sense. “I work in the infant mortality field, and we
know the impact of stress on African-American women and the impact on their
outcomes. We know African-American women have the highest rate of infant
mortality, with 14 African-American babies dying for every 1,000 — 6 for white
babies, so that is double,” Dr. Scott told Atlanta Black Star.
“We see a lot of babies who die because they are in
unsafe sleeping environments,” she noted. “We are in the process of
training Kappa membership to go out in the community to target specifically men
on safe sleep practices for infants. It is growing; it is amazing when
you start teaching men. When men are involved in prenatal care,
especially in the first 3 to 4 weeks, we see how infants thrive,” Scott added.
Two issues that concern the participants in the Global
Life Chances Initiative are the trust of the Black community, and the stigma
over mental illness among African-Americans. “That whole trust issue, that’s
why it is so important that the partners look like the community we’re
servicing,” Dr. Scott said “A predominantly African-American membership
is important because there is that mistrust. We know because of the Tuskegee fiasco,“ she noted, adding it is
important “to have key people and key researchers who look like our community
and build that trust so that people will not be exploited.
There is such a disproportional representation of
communities of color with health disparities, and it turns into an indictment
of a particular group. And it is not an indictment, but reflects
discrimination and segregation, and so I think it is going to be a slow-moving
train” she said, noting that it all adds up to getting the message out one
person at a time.
“It is a fresh new phenomenon. and the community is
ready. And we are tired of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ ” Scott
added. “Maybe it is not something wrong with me, and I am a victim of
racism.”
Dr. Stacy Scott, National Kappa Foundation’s Healthy
Kappas/Healthy Communities National Initiative says “On a national level, 1 in
5 people are impacted by a mental health condition, and we know that stigma and
overcoming the stigma is real. But this is an awareness campaign we are
launching to understand how to reach our community, how to make service
delivery culturally sensitive, to take into consideration the historic stigma
our community has faced with mental health issues, and neuroscience.
So, that is part of our relationship with the Kappa
Foundation, a fraternity that is well respected, and we go to the grassroots
and find ways to be more effective,” Penn noted. “Through education,
through door-to-door outreach and having culturally competent delivery
providers, we know we’re going to have more of an impact than what has been
historically done.”
According to Penn, often there is a lack of
understanding of how to work with the Black community. The Global Life
Chances Initiative hopes to provide a blueprint for upliftment though outreach
to the community and addressing a serious condition.
Given “the stigma
that is associated with mental health issues, I personally want to see our
organization and the Kappa Foundation be the institutions that lead this
movement to make it easy for families, for individuals, for people of color, so
that it is easy to come in and get help when I need it, to seek treatment when
I need it. I don’t need to mask and hide the symptoms; I can come in. The same
way you feel comfortable calling the doctor when you have a headache, people
with mental health issues can find it easy to come in and ask for help,” he
said.
“When you say ‘I am not quite right,’ I can give you a
reason why I am not quite right,” Dr. Scott noted of this planned
research. “It does give you another tool, and if we put it out there
right, people begin to get a better understanding in regards to why we are the
way we are.
For example, why do so many African-Americans have high
blood pressure? It gives some foundations as to why the community has
such plights,” she said. “If you look at the brain and things of that
nature, they want to blame the victim, and the idea that if we give you a pill
and some job training, you’ll be OK.”
Meanwhile, the undertaking has serious implications in
the public policy realm, with the potential to change the status quo. According
to Dr. Linda James Myers, Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and
African-American Studies at The Ohio State University and Director of The
Ohio State University Black Studies Extension Center in Columbus, Ohio, the
neuroscience of poverty provides a social context for what is affecting
the Black community. She argues that Western science, for instance, is
not holistic, and fails to make the necessary connections between one’s
environment and physical and mental well-being.
“A more African-centered perspective assumes that what
happens in my physical environment will affect my behavior and my chemistry,
and that constant stress will affect every aspect of my physiology, including
the brain,” Dr. Myers told Atlanta Black Star. She added that this more
holistic and integrated African-centered perspective is nothing new.
Further, a holistic world view and a cultural frame of reference that was
previously missing will allow us to counter the notion that poverty is the
result of Black people making bad decisions.
Dr. Linda James Myers, Professor of Psychology,
Psychiatry and African American Studies at The Ohio State University and
Director of The Ohio State University Black Studies Extension Center in
Columbus, Ohio says “One of the big things that we want to concentrate on in
the first phase is to educate the decision makers that make policy, allocate
funding, educate them on this work that we are undertaking,” Penn said “What
is different about this partnership that does not exist anywhere else in the
country is that you have a unique partnership, with an integrated strategic
approach on how to lay out a plan of dealing with the history of trauma that
African-Americans have dealt with for decades. We have a strategy to begin to
ask the questions and explore the research on how to better serve our
community,” he noted.
“We know the issues exist, and there has been a system
of a continued way of treating the problem, continuing to fund a certain model,
but we’re looking at how do you, with scientific data, change the direction
that we find many of our young people, many of our adults, living in poverty?
How do we change the infection and change the cycle?
We don’t want to lead by emotion, but we want our
emotion to be inspired by research. It will benefit not only our community
but all communities,” Penn added, as the program will be emulated nationwide. “White
folks won’t believe it unless it is researched,” Dr. Scott suggested, offering
that the program has the potential to upend policies such as the welfare
system, which is based on the premise of a work ethic. People in
welfare-to-work programs are set up to fail, she noted, and people are punished
as if it is a reflection on them. What happens, for example, when it is
discovered they cannot perform certain work functions because of trauma.
“If there is long-term impact of trauma on the brain,
that debunks the whole argument,” she concluded. “It is really going to
challenge the status quo, and looking at all these acts and the welfare system,
you can make an impact because what they’re doing is not working, and there is
going to be a lot of fallout, because people don’t like change,” Scott
said. “You don’t hear them talk about research and African-Americans with
regard to this theory. This might be on purpose, because we would have another
tool to say we want our 40 acres and a mule.”
Once the word spreads about this new initiative, Dr.
Scott believes, it is going to be phenomenal. However, she provides a
warning: “We have to be very, very careful to make sure they don’t use this
against us. We have to advocate, because if they think we have a brain
dysfunction they will write us off. It is important to make sure advocacy
groups are on the case, because it is not our fault.”
“One of the advantages with this initiative is trying
to get the powers that be to see that what is different about what young Black
people are experiencing in poverty today from what young Black people
experienced back in the day with chattel enslavement and sharecropping is the
role of the community, despite the poverty,” said Dr. Myers.
“Now we have urban
renewal, our community has been fractured and displaced, our people were placed
in public housing which is not good for our community as it produces anger
and frustrationand now without the community to support and without the
educational system you have complete disenfranchisement. You have
dislocation and generalized depression. Instead of asking what is wrong with
these young people, we should ask: What is happening and how can we change it?”
“The fact that we see the physiological change because
now we have the technology to monitor it has principal benefits and also great
costs. The benefits mean that Western researchers must concede that these
children are in a demeaning, disenfranchising environment that affects their
brain. Maybe that means we not only need early literacy but to be more holistic
in what children are experiencing. That awareness is coming is a good
thing. Unfortunately, it has taken a long time to come to that realization,”
Dr. Myers offered.
“The downside is, ‘Oh my God, these Black children are
deficient.’ They are open to being stigmatized, and the Black community is
going to be further disenfranchised. We have to make sure that the people
engaged in the research will not go that route,” she added, noting the evidence
that the condition is not irreversible. “The evidence is the 250 years Black
people spent in enslavement. I can’t think of a more hostile
environment. Then you see Black people emerging out of chattel slavery
making all the contributions to the industrial and technological revolution,”
she added.
Meanwhile, Jordan reflected on the importance of having
Black organizations step up to tackle this issue in the Black community, rather
than rely on white society. “No longer can we depend on them to solve our
problems. We have the expertise, the talent, the facilities and the
ideas. We live this. We are the ones who have been here 400 years, and we are
going to get it solved.”
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