Carlil Pittman experienced the trauma firsthand. As a co-founder of the Chicago youth organization GoodKidsMadCity-Englewood, he mourned the death of Delmonte Johnson, a young neighborhood activist, two years ago a victim of the phenomenon he fought strongly against: gun violence.
He was annoyed and frustrated by the constant stories of African Americans being murdered by the police.
The first was Breonna Taylor, a young black woman who was shot at her home in Louisville, Kentucky, last March. Dan George Floyd, who died because a police officer put a knee on his neck in Minneapolis, sparking protests around the world. In recent days, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, was fatally injured by an officer during a stop for a driving violation in Minnesota, a short distance from where Floyd died.
Last Friday, Pittman spent much of the day planning a rally with other activists to protest the death of a 13-year-old Hispanic boy, Adam Toledo, at the hands of the police.
“The whole time we turn on the television, we look at Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, and we see people like us being killed without anything happening,” said Pittman, an activist at A New Deal For Youth. “It’s not normal for someone to be killed by clicking a video on your phone. But for us, in our black and Hispanic communities, it is the norm. “
Many African Americans feel a kind of collective trauma that gets worse when a member of that community is murdered by the police. Some are reflected in the victims of police brutality, adding to the pain they feel. The collective grief alarms medical professionals who believe that racism and the trauma it causes are a serious public health crisis in the United States.
The racial trauma African Americans are feeling isn’t new. It is the product of centuries of oppressive systems and racist practices deeply rooted in the nation. According to Dr. Steven Kniffley, a psychologist and coordinator of the Center for Collective Care at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, minorities who feel they are victims of racism and discrimination experience racial trauma.
“Many cities across the country are realizing that racial trauma is a public health problem,” Kniffley said, which can lead to suicides, lower life expectancy and lead to post-traumatic stress. Racial trauma responds to “the unique experiences blacks and Hispanics have because of their identity and, more specifically, because of the racism and discrimination they face.”
Kniffley said that every generation of African Americans since slavery has faced different combinations of racism and discrimination, manifested in some form of intergenerational trauma. “
“We have 10 or 15 generations of unresolved trauma, which is a major contributor to the mental health and biological disorders that we now have,” said Kniffley, adding that trauma isn’t just due to police brutality.
A 2018 study of the impact of the deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police revealed that this phenomenon affected the mental health of this community. Nearly half of the African Americans who responded said they were drenched in one or more murders of unarmed members of that community in their states, either because the news spread or through the media.
“That impact is only felt among blacks,” said Dr. Atheendar S. Venkataramani, one of the authors of the study, who works at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Color of Change president Rashad Robinson says this trauma is fueling mistrust in law enforcement agencies. And that many experience additional emotional distress at the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop who put his knee against Floyd’s neck.
“We have all these armed people who are supposed to protect and serve us and who are doing neither,” Robinson said. “To survive, we have to integrate into a system of brutal structure… for our life, our dignity, our health. That has a collective impact in the long term ”.
Eréndira Martínez, who lives in Little Village, Chicago’s largely Spanish neighborhood, says she is suffering greatly from the deaths of children like Toledo.
Last Thursday, hours after the video of Toledo’s death was first circulated, a 17-year-old girl was shot dead in the same neighborhood. A teenage daughter of Martinez was also shot dead in Little Village in December.
“We buried my daughter and a month later we buried this girl who grew up with my daughter,” said Martínez. “No mother should bury her daughter.”
Some neighborhood groups are trying to overcome the trauma, said Aswad Thomas of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, which heads Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, a network of more than 46,000 mostly Hispanic and African-American crime survivors.
Uzodinma Iweala, CEO of The Africa Center in New York, said the suffering of the African-American community sometimes angered her. Think of the times he and his brothers were stopped by the police. Or the time a cop insulted his uncle. Or the number of times they pleaded to get out of a situation safely. All experiences that some whites knowingly ignore.
“The United States refuses to recognize that it wouldn’t be a country without the work, blood, sweat and tears of black people,” said Iweala.