mong
the many fine presentations offered at the 10th Annual MAAFA
Commemoration held throughout the month of September by the St. Paul
Community Baptist Church in East New York, Brooklyn, was an excellent
session by Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary, Assistant Professor at Portland State
University. In it, she laid out her theory of Post-Traumatic Slave
Syndrome (PTSS), explaining what it is, how it’s been passed down
through the generations, and its ongoing ill effects on the Black
community today. She made a clear case for the need to identify PTSS so
it can be dealt with, because, as she stated, "We can’t heal what we
don’t understand."
Leary’s
concept is based on the theory of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),
which is firmly accepted by the psychiatric establishment. It’s now
taken as a given that there are people who will need treatment for the
ongoing damage they suffered psychologically from the trauma of
experiencing or witnessing life-threatening events such as military
combat, a terrorist attack, natural disaster, serious accident or a
violent personal assault, including rape.
People afflicted with PTSD, Leary explained, often
relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks. They may have
difficulty sleeping, be irritable, have outbursts of anger, exaggerated
startle responses and feel estranged from others. Their ability to
function in social, work or family life is also impaired. This includes
having trouble holding down a job, marital problems and difficulties in
parenting.
As Leary also pointed out, PTSD is not a new
disorder; there are written accounts of similar symptoms going back to
ancient times. During the Civil War, there was documentation of a PTSD-like
disorder known as "Da Costa's Syndrome". Following the Second World War
and every war since, countless combat veterans have been treated for
"shellshock". Both are now recognized as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Nor is it new to look at this trauma theory in a
collective way, applying it to people as a group, such as the Indigenous
Peoples or Jewish Holocaust survivors, who suffered historical injuries.
The
thing that is new – and very much needed – is the application of this
theory to Africans who were enslaved in American and to their
descendants. That is what Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary has brought to the table
with her identification of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
It is her contention that African Americans today are
still affected terribly by past centuries of slavery in this country
because the original enslaved Africans were never treated for the severe
trauma of being degraded, beaten and abused, seeing relatives whipped,
raped and killed, being forced to breed and having their babies taken
from them, and all the other unspeakably horrible things that occurred
during slavery.
Even after slavery officially ended, nothing was done
to help Blacks recover from the trauma resulting from it. In fact, as
Leary illustrated, the traumatizing circumstances continued - and one
might even say increased - with the Black Codes, peonage, sharecropping,
lynchings, Jim Crow laws and all the other things that, for all
practical purposes, kept Blacks in bondage.
Even with the passage of the civil rights acts of the
1960s, Leary explained, no measures were put in place to help African
Americans cope with all they had suffered, and to rectify the damage
that the maltreatment had done to them mentally, spiritually and
physically over many generations. Plus, today Blacks in America still
face racism, oppression and societal inequality. "There was never a
period of time when Africans in this nation were given the permission or
the wherewithal to heal from our injury, so the trauma has continued,"
she stated.
Leary brought across how you don’t have to be the
direct victim of a horrible occurrence to be traumatized by it. That was
clear after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon when
people all over the nation were traumatized even though they,
themselves, were nowhere near either event.
She showed how attitudes and behaviors resulting from
trauma can be passed down from generation to generation without people
even being conscious of doing it. She also broke down for her listeners
how survival techniques that were developed during slavery have been
carried down inter-generationally, even when they were no longer needed,
to the detriment of the Black community.
She
addressed some of the specific difficulties among African Americans and
illustrated how they are symptoms of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She
showed, for instance, how various problems between Black men and women
today have their origin in slavery, and how the "Crabs in a Barrel
Syndrome" as it’s been called, is a leftover from coping mechanisms
begun when some enslaved Africans were made over-seers of others working
in the fields.
There was much food for thought presented during Dr.
Joy DeGruy-Leary’s gripping two-hour presentation. Certainly everyone
went away with important new information to ponder and digest.
Read Donna's Last Column
