Assault on the Black Body….and the Black Mind.

Is anyone getting psychological assistance for that young 15 year-old girl who was literally (white) man handled in the video from the pool party in McKinney, TX over the weekend?  Is anyone wondering what generational and psychic trauma that brought up in her young black girl body?  And the trauma that it brings up in black girls and women across the world?  I know that watching the video – which I finally made myself do today – hit a pain in me that was not physically my own, but pain of my ancestors and a generational memory of assault and rape of slavery.

As a social justice educator and researcher about internalized oppression, specifically racism, I work to stay aware of what is happening in the nation regarding race, justice, identity and power – but I also recognize that what I take in visually and aurally on a daily basis affects me emotionally and intellectually.  And while we have continued to recognize the way the Black body is being physically assaulted and murdered century after century, I worry that we have not had such a good watch on the Black mind.  Particularly, the pummeling that the Black Mind (and spirit) takes on a regular basis at the hands of media images, day to day racial macro and microaggressions and sometimes at the insidiousness of the racism that lives within after generations and generations of swallowing the hate in order to survive.

The young Black girl’s physical body indubitably will have sore muscles and bruises to heal, but what is the healing that has to take place in her soul and mind?  Do we as a nation even know how to begin scratching the surface of that impact of that moment – and the constant reliving that occurs now that it has become a viral assault?  I think sometimes as a nation of video watchers, we sometimes get caught up with the sensational - wanting to make sure the person who commits the atrocious action pay for what they did. Sometimes we forget that the emotional and spiritual impact on an individual, community or a people won’t necessarily be healed by the suspension or indictment of an officer, though the accountability for an action is important.  I worry about our lack of ability to hold the psychological impact of these moments that are broadcast far, wide and often.

One of my favorite movies, The Matrix, says it best, “The body cannot live without the mind.”  As we remember that Black lives matter – those lives consist of both body and mind.  Emotional selves, intellectual selves and spiritual selves are being hurt in this racialized world that we’ve created, as well.  And as we work to create a world that exists without racism, if we have not cared for and protected our emotional selves and the Black Mind, we will struggle to step into the power that has been rightfully ours this whole time.

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