TO BE SURE, AFRICAN AMERICANS HAVE NOT ALWAYS HAD IT EASY, BUT COPPING OUT ISN’T THE ANSWER.
On July 2, I was sitting at home watching the Sunday news programs. There were the standards like Meet the Press and This Week. There was also a local program that I occasionally watch called Positively Black. This particular show runs on the New York NBC outlet, WNBC, and features programming of interest to the African American community. I sometimes watch the program to get some insight into the political issues effecting the Black community in New York, the nation and the world. This Sunday, I learned of something on Positively Black that to me was positively outrageous.
It seems a woman named Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary was on the program speaking about her book, POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME: AMERICA’S LEGACY OF ENDURING INJURY AND HEALING. The premise of Dr. DeGruy Leary’s book is most interesting. She believes that the failure of African Americans to achieve high positions in our society is based on this syndrome, that, in effect, African Americans have been so damaged by the legacy of slavery that they are unable to function in a meaningful productive manner.
Having never heard of POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME, I decided to do a bit of informal research into the subject. The first thing I did was speak with several friends who are either psychologists or psychiatrists. In each case, these mental health professionals gave me the identical answer, “It’s a cop out.”
Here’s the problem as they described it. There are definitely post-traumatic syndromes that come from various elements, combat being one of the most common. However, in order for the dysfunctional activity associated with the syndrome to be valid, the trauma must have been relatively recent at the time the symptoms appeared. Slavery ended in this country 141 years ago. Neither the parents nor the grandparents of any of the people claiming to be suffering from this illness have had any direct relationship with American slavery.
To be sure, African Americans have not always had it easy. There has been massive discrimination since slavery ended. Black children often attended inferior segregated schools, top jobs were often denied to highly qualified members of the African American community and, certainly, Black folks couldn’t always eat or live where they wanted. All of that happened, and none of it was very good. Welfare became more of a curse than a blessing to Black people, creating a culture in which work was regarded as foolish in some communities. Those things happened, but to say that they were the result of the trauma of slavery is a bit over the top.
We in the liberal world need to be extremely careful in our reaction to the notion of POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME. Our adversaries on the right often seize on the opportunity to make us look silly, particularly when we take a position that could be interpreted as being off the wall. I can just picture the comic strip, Mallard Fillmore, having a field day with this. I can also see a schmuck like Senator James Sensenbrenner, who is trailing badly in the polls in his bid for reelection, using POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME as fodder for his cannon when shooting barbs across the bow of his Democratic opponent.
This will be spoken of as a bald faced attempt to extort reparations money from the federal government, and, frankly, as liberal as I may be, I can understand the feelings of those who would make those comments.
Some black acquaintances have suggested that instead of cash repartitions, the proper way to solve the problem would be to offer a free undergraduate college education to every Black kid in the country. The cost of such a program would, of course, be staggering. It would also serve to prevent qualified Caucasian and Asian kids from receiving needed aid. In short, it would be reverse discrimination, and that never solved any problem.
As I said earlier, it is 141 years since the end of slavery, and the notion of a current POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME does not seem to make any sense to me. What the African American community truly needs to do is to stop copping out and begin taking responsibility for both their successes and their failures.
I am white and Jewish. I do not suffer from a yet undiagnosed disease called post- traumatic Holocaust Syndrome. I know a number of Cambodians of my generation, and they do not suffer from post-traumatic Killing Fields syndrome. Both of those horrendous blots on human history occurred far more recently thanAfrican American slavery, and, yet, the descendants of those who suffered through these tragic events make no claims that any failures in their lives are directly related to them.
Responsibility is the key. We must be responsible for our own lives and our own actions. We cannot blame the actions of those who lived who lived 21, 61 or especially141 years ago for the failures of the descendants of their victims. We must, at some point, say that what I am is my own responsibility. I will fail, or I will succeed, based on my own actions and not on the history of my ancestors. To do less would be dishonest. To do less would provide grist for the mill of the right wing propagandists, and they do well enough creating that on their own.
HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT
