A year ago, this video by Dr. Joy DeGruy left me speechless. Could public denigration of a young black boy, by his very own mother, have its roots in an act of protection? Now, rewatching this in the midst of COVID-19 disproportionately ravaging communities of color is even more heartbreaking.
In January, my son’s history teacher lent me Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He writes:
When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—”Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit.
During quarantine Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has taught me that eviction is for black women what mass incarceration is for black men. Telling the story of one black mother and her two sons navigating cycles of homelessness and eviction, Desmond writes:
Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways of telling them they didn’t deserve it. When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was selfish, or just bad. Sometimes when Jafaris was hungry, Arleen would tell him to stay out of the barren cupboards because he was getting too fat. You could only say “I’m sorry, I can’t” so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself by finding ways to say “No, I won’t.” I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
Connecting these dots, on behalf of all my friends of color, has been sobering. Though these stories are specific to the black experience in America’s white supremacist culture, I can imagine there is a unique translation for my Asian-American, Latin-X and Native American friends as well. These writers have also left me wondering if there is truth here for my own story? How might my mother’s history of trauma, coupled with the powerlessness she experienced as she raised me, translated into denigrating messages meant to protect either mine or her’s tenuous survival?
How do you remember feeling devalued as a child? Who communicated you were unworthy in some way because they were unable to provide something, tangible or intangible, that you needed or wanted? What story of fear driven punishment do you need to tell in order to excavate the flawed care that left you wounded? How was this story, in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words, both an alarm and a choking of your sense of worth?