v12n15 - Good Ideas for Girls and Boys

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Digging up the Roots by Donna Ladd

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hen discussing the very difficult issue of violence, we find there are two types of people: those who don’t care why criminals resort to violence, and those who get that preventing it can only come from attacking it at the roots. That is, we stop crime before it happens by trying to understand and fix why a young person takes that turn in the first place. Yet, if you don’t hold the clearly racist belief that young blacks are statistically more likely to commit crime because they’re black, then logic dictates that we should seek out the reasons—and then change those conditions. The Atlanta Black Star presented a compelling and unflinching “5 Reasons Young Black Men Resort To Violence� that circulated Facebook recently. In it, they quoted the late Dr. Amos Wilson, a Hattiesburg-born psychology professor and expert on black crime, who found that young black men resorted to crime due to a system that had “excluded and oppressed them for centuries.� “Personal responsibility is a factor, but understanding how the minds of young black boys have been negatively impacted by racial oppression may provide insight on what solutions will be effective in remedying the problem,� Andre Moore wrote in the piece. Here are the five reasons the piece gave; please consider with an open mind (and read to the end):

1. Slavery and Racial Oppression

December 18 - 24, 2013

Anyone who has a child or has been one, or who is the child of an alcoholic, knows that tough family issues can affect a child’s self-esteem and chances for success. Now, imagine that your family descended from (recent) generations of oppressed people. It’s hard to deny the clear truth that a history of enslavement, brutality, rape and disparagement of one’s family can leave extremely deep scars. “The trauma caused by this psychological brutality resulted in severe damage to the mind of the victims, which manifested as an identity crisis, self hate, low self worth, and a distrust of the world at large. This mentality has been passed down through generations,� Moore’s Atlanta Black Star post stated. And those practices—and legal discrimination such as red-lining and job/education discrimination—led directly to the conditions of impoverished neighborhoods today: “low socioeconomic status, social deprivation, inadequate education, high unemployment, and the criminal industrial complex has reinforced this negative mentality,� Moore wrote, backed up by scads

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of scientific research on the psychology of oppression. Put another way, the hunted can become the hunters if we’re not careful and proactive about changing the conditions caused by historic actions and brutality. SOLUTIONS:

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2. Being Devalued

It makes a lot of sense that young people growing up in devalued cultures then act in aggressive ways to try to command some sort of “respect�—even if it’s a negative, violent kind. This is why it is so harmful for media and members of the larger community to make assumptions about children of color—or to apply double standards to them as happened in the Trayvon Martin case where his “self-defense� wasn’t considered as important as that of his killer. Experts find that cultural biases, often redistributed through skewed media coverage and obsession with reporting crime over positives in a community, contribute to the devaluation of a young person in his own mind, often leading to acting out or worse. Lisa Firestone, a clinical psychologist and expert on the criminal mind, wrote in Psychology Today that people who resort to violence often have “voices� (negative thought processes) that flood their minds, setting the stage for aggressive behavior. “Understanding what is going on in the mind of someone who is violent allows us to better assess the risk

How Violence Grows

For shame to turn into violence, several conditions need to be present—ones that are more likely among uneducated, unemployed, unskilled, poor and homeless people, and members are groups subjected to systemic shaming by society: 1 The person hasn’t developed the emotions of guilt and remorse that keeps them from hurting others. 2 The shame and humiliation are so strong that they threaten “the cohesion and viability of the self.� 3 The person doesn’t believe he has “sufficient nonviolent means by which to save or restore his self-esteem.�

for violence and to intervene, protecting both the potential perpetrator and victim,� she advises. “Many risk factors for violence can’t be changed, but a person’s thinking is a risk factor that can be.� Dr. James Gilligan, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine who specializes in the causes of violent crime, writes that being shamed is a major cause of violence. [P]eople resort to violence when they feel that they can wipe out shame only by shaming those who they feel shamed them. The most powerful way to shame anyone is by means of violence, just as the most powerful way to provoke anyone into committing violence is by shaming him,� he writes. Gilligan warns that traditional punishment of both children and criminals often induces shame, which in turn can make the receiver more violent. The violence is a direct reaction, he says, of the lack of self-love; his findings show that being aggressive is often a way to reclaim self-respect, or self-love.

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