An enlightening discussion on our history and mental awareness from Dr. Mel and Dr. Afiya. Dr. Afiya has a private practice that utilizes the hair salon as a way of informing and healing our mental status.
What are some of the mental challenges or mental pathology that we still carry to this day that might be traced back to enslavement?
Dr. Afiya: This has actually been something that a lot of black psychologists have been studying for their entire careers. People like Joy Deru who wrote the book Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome identifies some of the symptoms of never being able to heal from the trauma of hundreds of years of our enslavement. She identifies the symptoms of ever-present anger, being riled up and frustrated and hostile, from small experiences because of the inability to actually heal from trauma. She identifies the concept of vacant self-esteem basically meaning that we value ourselves on things that don’t actually matter that much, but are more so superficial, like our clothes versus what’s in our heads. The symptom of continuing racist socialization, prioritizing whiteness and approximations towards whiteness rather than valuing African culture and people. So there’s a variety of things that Dr. Joy Deru says that impacts us even relating to our family, our friends, colorism, all these different factors that can actually be the result of the trauma of our enslavement.
What about children? How are they dealing with the stress of being schooled in systems that may not value or respect them?
Dr. Afiya: There is a book called “Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children.” And it really speaks about how these systems that exist are miseducating us. In terms of when you learn about everyone else, but yourself and true education, really aligning with learning about yourself and others. Some people are DIS-educated where they don’t learn anything about other people or anything about themselves. I definitely participate in a few homeschool collectives where the parents have really had to supplement some of the miseducation that’s out there around black people, brown history, a brown culture, and actually study and learn themselves so that they can then teach it to their children. I think that it can really harm black children when they don’t learn anything about black people, or the greatness of our history and culture. And so one of my favorite books that I read in the past year is “Lies”
Is Juneteenth symbolic or will it have an impact?
Dr. Mel: I say, it already has. I mean, it is a touch point for people to start to learn more about our history and to honor our ancestors and to try to counter the narrative, unfortunately, that we do get in schools. I think that’s one of the things that, you know, there’s the commercialism on one part that I think is inevitably gonna happen and we saw some of it already happen, but then there’s also our role and responsibility in making sure that we use it as an opportunity to educate our children and to make sure that they have the foundation to know about what we are, what we have dealt with and how we can best continue to deal with it and overcome it.
This very enlightening discussion is one to see and hear in its totality. Click the link to enjoy it in full
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