Carlil Pittman experienced trauma in his own flesh. As a co-founder of the Chicago youth organization GoodKidsMadCity-Englewood, he has mourned the death of Delmonte Johnson, a young neighborhood activist, two years ago, a victim of the phenomenon he fought so hard: gun violence.
He was irritated and frustrated by the constant stories of African Americans dying at the hands of the police.
First up was Breonna Taylor, a young black woman shot at her home in Louisville, Kentucky, in March last year. Then George Floyd, died because a policeman rested a knee on his neck in Minneapolis, giving way to protests around the world. In recent days, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, has been mortally wounded by an officer during an arrest for a driving offense in Minnesota, not far from where Floyd died.
Last Friday Pittman spent much of the day planning a rally along with other activists to protest the death of a 13-year-old Hispanic boy, Adam Toledo, at the hands of police.
“All the time we turn on the TV, we see Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, and we see people like us murdered without anything happening,” said Pittman, an activist for A New Deal For Youth. “It’s not normal to see someone being killed by clicking on a video on the phone. But for us, in our black and Hispanic communities, it’s the norm.”
Many African Americans feel a kind of collective trauma, which is aggravated every time a member of this community dies at the hands of the police. Some are reflected in the victims of police violence, which aggravates the pain they feel. The collective duel alarms medical professionals, who see the racism and trauma it generates as a serious public health crisis in the United States.
The racial trauma that African Americans feel is not new. It is the product of centuries of oppressive systems and racist practices deeply rooted in the nation. Racial trauma is something experienced by minorities who feel victims of racism and discrimination, according to Dr. Steven Kniffley, a psychologist and coordinator of the Collective Care Center at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.
“Many cities across the country are realizing that racial trauma is a public health issue,” said Kniffley, who can cause suicide, lower life expectancy and cause post-traumatic stress. Racial trauma responds to “the unique experiences that blacks and Hispanics live because of their identity and, more specifically, because of the racism and discrimination they face.”
Kniffley said that every generation of African Americans since the time of slavery has faced different combinations of racism and discrimination, which manifest themselves in a form of intergenerational trauma. “
“We have 10 or 15 generations of unresolved traumas, which contribute greatly to the biological and mental health disorders we have now,” Kniffley said, adding that trauma is not just about responding to police violence.
A 2018 study on the impact of African American deaths at the hands of police revealed that this phenomenon affected the mental health of this community. Nearly half of the African Americans who responded said they were soaked in one or more massacres of members of this community unarmed in their states, either because word spread or through the media.
“This impact is perceived only among blacks,” said Dr. Atheendar S. Venkataramani, one of the study’s authors, who works at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, says this trauma fuels mistrust in law enforcement agencies. And that many experience additional emotional distress at seeing the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis ex-cop who put his knee on Floyd’s neck.
“We have all these armed people who have to protect and serve us and who do neither one thing nor the other,” Robinson argued. “To survive, we must integrate into a system with a brutal structure … for our lives, our dignity, our health. That has a long-term collective impact.”
Eréndira Martínez, who lives in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Chicago, Little Village, says she suffers greatly from the deaths of boys like Toledo.
Last Thursday, hours after the video of Toledo’s death was first distributed, a 17-year-old girl was shot dead in the same neighborhood. A teenage daughter of Martinez also died shot in Little Village in December.
“Burying my daughter and a month later we are burying this girl who was raised with my daughter,” Martinez expressed. “No mother should have to bury her daughter.”
Some neighborhood groups are trying to help overcome the trauma, said Aswad Thomas of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, which runs the Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice organization, a network of more than 46,000 crime survivors, mostly Hispanic and African American.
Uzodinma Iweala, CEO of The Africa Center in New York, said the sufferings of the African American community sometimes make him angry. Think of the times he and his brothers were stopped by police. Or the time an agent insulted his uncle. Or the number of times they prayed to get out of danger from a situation. Experiences all that some whites ignore knowing.
“The United States refuses to recognize that it would not be a country without the work, blood, sweat and tears of black people,” Iweala said.