Retracing Our Paths - Remembering Our Origins
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P R O F I T - THEN
“White households have been able to build wealth for themselves and their descendants, while whatever wealth Black families could amass was regularly stripped away.”
—Center for American Progress
By Sterling Hawkins, MSW, LCSW, LICSW
African Americans have historically had a strained relationship with wealth, which is intertwined with economic, human, physical, and social capital. When Blacks proved valuable to a developing Republic, we were exploited for our labor. When our labor became less profitable due to mechanization, we were physically and socially oppressed, unable to buy and sell property. We were denied due process, judged, and condemned as undeserving.
Whenever a person of color rose above insurmountable odds, they became targets, were vilified, and made an example of what can happen when you reach too far and dream too big. The lesson Blacks learned from systemic racism is that practices embedded in American society were designed to perpetuate inequality. Under such practices in many American institutions, Blacks spent their whole lives just trying to avoid being singled out. They were less ambitious, less hopeful, and often fearful for reasons, having less to do with their competence and resourcefulness and more to do with their denial and punishment.
This is how intergenerational trauma began to manifest and then become embedded over time into the fabric of the Black community. Social scientists believe these are adaptive strategies aimed at survival and avoiding harm (psychological and physical).
The downside of Capitalism is the inability to attain wealth or lose it simply because others believe you don’t deserve it. Wealth and power require checks and balances. Something that America has struggled with since its infancy. Equality and Want coexist but are rivals under a democratic system. An example of this can be seen in the New Deal Policies proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945).
FDR’s New Deal forced many Black farmers off their land and failed to support them in their efforts to create opportunities for social justice. Two such policies- Relief for the Poor and Unemployed and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were of no benefit to Blacks due to discrimination and exclusionary practices. Blacks were excluded under Jim Crow (1865 1968)- a system of segregation and disenfranchisement introduced in the South to preserve racial discrimination. On April 11, 1968, The U.S. Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and other factors.
In the twenty-first century, all American citizens expected their government to protect their civil rights. Before the 1960s, most Americans embraced the notion that police powers (i.e., laws that govern safety, health, welfare, and morals) were reserved for individual states and did not envision the federal government protecting their health and safety. Black civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s campaigned against laws that discriminated against people of color that had existed from the early 1900s. (NAACP’s Anti-Lynching Campaigns: The Quest for Social Justice in the Interwar Years, n.d.)
Under state law, Blacks were often subject to arrest, conviction, and incarceration without a jury. Under Jim Crow, the 6th and 7th Amendments (1791), which guarantee individuals the right to trial by jury in both civil and criminal cases, were not enforced or equitably applied in cases involving Black defendants. The result was that many Blacks were charged for crimes that they never committed. Having been denied due process, we had our property confiscated from us simply because we demonstrated industry and ambition that our white neighbors found threatening.
In the South, death by lynching was a probable outcome for Blacks wrongly convicted. It is estimated that there were approximately 6,500 documented racially motivated lynchings between 1865 and 1950. (Reconstruction in America - Report Overview | Equal Justice Initiative, 2022).
Employment for Black households In the Jim Crow South was often limited, with low wages; when men were removed from the home without expectation of returning, families dependent on such income frequently failed, allowing the state to come and repossess our property and personal belongings, leaving many families destitute. From 1901 to the 1930s, American wealth was primarily found in land and property ownership.
Land rights have historically always been prized by all (whites and Blacks) in an agricultural society. Blacks, too, were tied to the land through their suffering enslavement and by the potential it held to free them from a life of poverty. If only they could acquire it and hold onto it.
The following account highlights the challenges that many Blacks who were fortunate enough to own property faced.
“For years, I always heard my mother speak about "the land." Often, when she spoke about it, it would be with that somewhat shy and embarrassed tone that educated black folks living up north use when talking about the folks they left back home. It was one of those pieces of history that over time had to become myth or else you would spend too much time worrying over it. . . Larry Boy, my mother's cousin, who was just a few years older then me, carried around a briefcase full of papers. Every now and then, he would call us, soliciting funds for a lawsuit over the land. I reacted like my mother until one day, I went to Natchez [Mississippi] for a family reunion and looked at Larry's papers. The papers told a pretty straightforward story, though I cannot remember it all now. It seems that we could have been oil barons.
Apparently, my mother's father or great-grandfather had a piece of land back in the 1920s that I think was given to him by the owners of a plantation where he was a slave. He kept this land until the 1920s, when someone claimed he had not paid taxes on the land. The land was then seized, auctioned and purchased by one of the rich families of Natchez. Then, oil was found on the land. This is the story Larry told me as he pulled a photocopy of a tax receipt showing that my great-grandfather had paid his taxes and that the land was really stolen from him. Then he showed me more papers about the lawsuit filed against the thieves by my mother's uncle and papers declaring an old aunt, the rightful heir, insane so they could file the suit.
Everybody agreed that he shouldn't have. He was probably cheated. But this was 1950s Natchez, now. He was black. Not well educated. They were white, and they were the law. What more was there to say? So everyone got a couple of hundred dollars rather than tens of thousands, perhaps. It could have given my family some real wealth, something for us to inherit that would put us on equal footing rather than a legacy of oppression and slavery that everyone tries to convince us is more myth than real. Today, Larry Boy still goes to city hall, poring over records and worrying about a piece of land that must now be a superfund site. So whenever people mention the word reparations, I think of the land (and so must the heirs of those who stole it).”
Stephen Casmier
St. Louis, MO (American Public Media, n.d.)
What do we hear in this person’s story? We should hear disbelief that a loss of this type has occurred. And that this type of loss in a just, democratic society is preventable.
Accompanying disbelief is denial. Denial in the sense that a person’s livelihood and wealth has been intentionally and illegally stolen from them without pretense. We should feel the succession of time and the efforts to correct a wrong that in the end is likely to remain unchanged.
Finally, we should hear the shame in the words “somewhat shy and embarrassed” in the telling of this story and how those who hear the shame avoid repeating it. An untold story is not repeated and becomes unknown to the next generation. Such stories are eventually forgotten.
This is an example of how trauma is passed from one generation to the next involving wealth. There are thousands of stories like this. Most are undocumented and forgotten. Some of these stories involve real estate or homes. Others involve equipment, livestock, or business interests. All of these stories represent wealth that absconded from rightful ownership.
If you are a mental health provider who serves individuals and families who have experienced this type of trauma related to wealth, what is one thing you can do that may help heal the emotional wounds that result from disentitlement?
I believe the one thing mental health providers can do is to allow people who have experienced this type of trauma to tell their stories and share their experiences in a safe and supportive environment. The focus of this type of storytelling should be to assist families with adjusting or building adaptive skills that correct misinformation, clarify interpretations and attributions, and develop empathy for the pain inherent in the story. The goal is to build resilience that may help the family cope with future stressors. Families who narrate the best and worst life experiences can pass down a heritage of memories from one generation to the next. Through story-telling, families can illuminate and combine their separate experiences into a meaningful whole. (Kiser et al., 2010)
The impact of story-telling on the education of children is critical. “Families using a coordinated narrative interaction style teach their children that they are part of a unified, cohesive family whose members understand and work through positive. and negative life experiences together. (Kiser et al., 2010)
In the end, we must remember to help others reflect on their loss, what remains in the aftermath, and what still needs to be preserved or reclaimed. And in the words of the late author and activist W.E.B Du Bois, we must remember that “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
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References:
American Public Media. (n.d.). Blacks remember Jim Crow | Remembering Jim Crow. https://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/remembering/blacks.html
Kiser, L. J., Baumgardner, B., & Dorado, J. (2010). Who are we, but for the stories we tell: Family stories and healing. Psychological Trauma Theory Research Practice and Policy, 2(3), 243–249. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019893
NAACP’s Anti-Lynching Campaigns: The quest for social justice in the interwar years. (n.d.). NEH-Edsitement. https://edsitement.neh.gov/curricula/naacps-anti-lynching-campaigns-quest-social-justice-interwar-years
Reconstruction in America - Report Overview | Equal Justice Initiative. (2022, October 25). Equal Justice Initiative. https://eji.org/reports/reconstruction-in-america-overview/