August 5, 2021 • 53 mins
We get way more from our ancestors than our height, nose or personality. We absorb life lessons that have been passed down from generation to generation. But what if those life lessons were first learned while trying to survive slavery? What if those skills are now more harmful than helpful and we don’t even know what we’re doing? Psychologist, social worker, researcher and teacher Dr. Joy DeGruy explains how descendants of slaves are more connected to their ancestors than they realize. But simple awareness can heal. //
Please rate, review, subscribe and share The Laverne Cox Show with everyone you know. You can find Laverne on Instagram and Twitter @LaverneCox and on Facebook at @LaverneCoxForReal. //
As always, stay in the love. //
References:
Dr. Joy DeGruy 10-Week Course:
(https://www.joydegruy.com/online-course)
Georgia Daycare Accused of Racism After 'Making Black Kids Wait to Eat'
(https://www.newsweek.com/georgia-daycare-accused-racism-after-making-black-kids-wait-eat-1583051)
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with My Heart Radio. Now, there are
certain people in America that would rather burn into the
ground than share it with you. Okay, let's be clear.
They'd rather take it down. No one will have it.
(00:22):
And there's a fair number of those. We've heard people say, well,
you know, get the police. You know, a few bad apples.
It's not bad apples, it's a bad orchard, right, and
we have to recognize that it's been grown that way.
(00:44):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox. Last year,
for the first time, I heard the term post traumatic
slave syndrome. The moment I heard this phrase, I was intrigued.
I was familiar with the concept of epigenetics and research
that found that intergenerational trauma can quite literally be transmitted
(01:08):
through our d n A and passed down to the
next generation. I thought about my grandfather and great grandfather,
who were sharecroppers who were beaten on plantations and then
trapped and indentured servitude post emancipation, and the painful legacy
that violence and trauma have had on my family. I
(01:30):
knew I wanted to talk to the woman who coined
this term about her research and how we might begin
our collective healing from post traumatic slave syndrome. Dr Joy
de Grew is a nationally and internationally renowned researcher and
educator whose work focuses on the intersection of racism, trauma, violence,
(01:52):
and American childil slavery. She has published numerous peer reviewed
journal articles and authored her seminal book, Entitle post Traumatic
Slave Syndrome America's Legacy of Enduring Injuring. Please enjoy my
conversation with Dr Joy. Hello, Dr Joy, and welcome to
(02:13):
the podcast. How are you feeling today? I am well,
How are you? I'm well. I'm really excited about this
conversation today about post traumatic slave syndrome. Can you tell
us a little bit about your background and what brought
you to um coined the term post traumatic slave syndrome
and do the research. Yes, my background is I have
(02:36):
I have a degree in communications and I have a
degree in ms W social work. I have a master's
degree also in clinical psychology. I have a PhD in
social work research. So that's my educational background, but I
think it's more about my lived experience that really led
me there. Um, I grew up my families from Louisiana,
(02:58):
and I grew up with my father went to the
sixth grade. My mother could have a full scholarship to college,
but stayed instead and raised a family. But my father
called himself an asiatic black man. So blackness was something
that was okay with me. You know, I'm sixty three
years old, and I grew up with a real healthy
(03:19):
feeling about my blackness. However, you know, I grew up
in a time when folks were called negroes and colored
and all the rest. But I remember as a child
hearing other kids, uh, and and adults, not just kids,
that if they got mad at you, they say you black,
and then fill into blank you black. And of course
(03:41):
the assumption here is that adding black is an an
additional injury or an additional insult. And for me, I'm like,
but you're black, you know what I mean. So it
didn't make sense to me. And then, you know, I
started to hear things like, oh my god, you know
she was so pretty even though she was dark. You know, uh,
he was he was really attractive. He was light skin,
(04:02):
diad had good hair. You know, all of those things
I grew up with and in in in context, I
guess that makes sense given the time, maybe, But then
I continue to hear it. You know, it didn't stop
all the way up until you know, two thousand and nine.
I think Chris Rock made the movie Good Hair, right. Um,
So for me, it started there, and it started with
(04:23):
me trying to understand what the ideology of that. Where
did that come from? You know, I've been to seven
countries in Africa. It wasn't an African thing. I heard
it from folks from the Caribbean. In other words, I
started to hear it from folks that shared a legacy
of enslavement, which was a very different and unique experience. Um.
And what I mean by that is while slavery itself,
(04:45):
and this is what you know, I got considerable pushback.
Slavery itself is not a new institution. It's existed for
a long time. And when people get really tested, they'll
tell you, well, you people enslaved each other. And I
was like, correct, and so did you people? Right? A
matter of fact, most societies in the world had some
form of indentured servitude or or slavery. So I'm starting
(05:06):
to look at where did this come from. And so
I started reading slave narratives. I started interviewing the oldest
people in my environment that I could that had memory right. Um,
And on one occasion, you know, actually at Lais Sandford,
who was the vice chancellor of education in New York,
(05:27):
I was on a on a radio call. She actually
called in and mentioned something that her grandmother had said
to her. Now, Adelaide was up in age at that
and I think she's in her nineties now, but she
talked about sitting at her grandmother's knee and hearing her
grandmother recount what it was like during slavery. So, you know,
I had enough context to realize that what is this?
(05:49):
Where did this come from? So I have now a
context of where it came from. I even have an
understanding of some of the behaviors, and I examined those
behaviors contemporary behavior years that folks don't even know why
they do what they do, right, because our history has
not been readily available to us, and their history we
(06:09):
have is a bit distorted, if not outright wrong about
about black people. And so I mean that's where I began,
and I began really trying to understand how we could
really love each other and embrace ourselves um better, you know,
And so that that's kind of where it starts. But
when I talk about post traumatic slave syndrome, um, I'm
(06:30):
talking about you know, some of the adaptive behaviors that
have been left over. Uh. It is not about a
pathologizing black people, It is not. It is about really
trying to tease the poison from the cookies. I'm trying
to tease out what is healthy, cultural understanding, knowledge and
(06:50):
relevant from the poison, which was what we had to
do to adapt to being in hostile environments. The kind
of things we had to do not look people well
in the eye, and you know, diminish our children so
people wouldn't look at our children as having value because
we didn't want them sold. I mean, all of the
things that we did. That makes sense. But you know,
(07:12):
when you start seeing those those behaviors, you know, like
I asked, so what this usually gets me trouble? You know,
has anyone heard of anyone saying go get a switch everybody?
I mean, I spoke to a whole room full of
psychiatrists and all the black pikers raising the hand, I said,
how many of them had you get a couple of
them and they brayed them together. You know, people are laughing.
(07:32):
I said, how many of them? How do you have?
You dip it? Leave it in water overnight? And then
they're like, wait a minute, I said, you know what
that is? That is pretty much a whip. Right, So
you're looking at a whip that you've created to hit
a child, right, and it's behavior. And then in the responses,
but big Mama loved me, and I'm like, yeah, big
(07:55):
Mama loved you, and I look at me, I'm okay.
I said, yeah, you're okay. In spy it of it,
not because of it. We don't have to hit children
with parts of branches on trees, you know what I mean.
So there there was that sense of culture, you see,
But what is it? What is it? Is it really
cultural or is it adaptive? Mm hmm? What do you think?
(08:15):
You know, it's really interesting. Many years ago, Jamie Foxx,
when he won his Academy award, talked about his grandmother,
you know, whipping him and beating him, and he sort
of made a joke of it and used in a
lot of black folks, we make jokes about getting the switch.
Oh yeah, we laugh. It's a knowing laughter, but it's
traumatizing for a lot of us. What do you think
that laughter is about? Is it about trying to diminish
(08:38):
the pain of it? I think what happens. You know,
there is a wonderful statement by Isabel Wilkerson and her
book cast And and she talks about it in the
context of of of living in an old house and
getting used to the broken pieces and the you know,
propping up floors and leaking ceiling things. We begin to normalize,
(09:03):
do you see? We normalize it so it doesn't get
it doesn't get um really brought into our consciousness as
a trauma. Right now at the time it's happening is traumatic.
But what we do is we normalize those behaviors to
such a degree that we don't allow ourselves to see
it any other way. But imagine, just let's just unpack
(09:24):
that for a moment. I'm getting you've done something wrong.
I'm going to to punish you, and I'm gonna make
you go get the weapon I'm sending you to get
the thing to hurt you with. And so there's there's
so many implications of what's wrong with that, just the
whole psychological impact. Go get me a switch to hit
(09:48):
you with. Now again, seven countries in Africa, I didn't
see people wailing on children in that way. I'm not
suggesting that they don't somewhere and there, but that wasn't
the common practice that I have experienced and I've spoken about.
And I know there's an incredible violence. Don't get me wrong,
there's violence everywhere. But I think we have to take
into account. You can train uh elephant without hitting it,
(10:12):
you know, I mean, so, come on, we don't have
to hit children. You I'm talked about post traumatic slave
syndrome as an a set of adaptive behaviors. How would
you distinguish um Let's colleges pts S post traumatic slave
syndrome from epigenetics? Right when trauma is passed down through
our d n A and through our genes, is there
a difference for you between the two or is there similarity?
(10:34):
Are connected? They're connected, so that not everything. First of all,
let me let me kind of set up this this
reality around trauma, because people are talking a lot about
trauma in a lot of different ways, and there's a clinical,
you know, a discussion of trauma where you experience a
severe you know, someone threatened your life, or something violent happens,
or it could even be a natural disaster, whatever, and
(10:55):
it causes your body to go into a certain kind
of it or flight or freeze kind of behavior. Right,
So there's that reality. Now, we could both be in
the same room together, and let's say we're at the conference,
you and I. We're at the conference and someone um
shoots somebody in the room shoots him, right, and well,
(11:18):
we know one that person is traumatized. Probably the person
seated nearest to them might be traumatized, but not necessarily
because everybody is not traumatized by traumatic events. Not you
know everybody that somebody will go wh it was really bad,
it was horrible. Let's go to lunch. Right, So we
don't all we don't all have the same response. When
(11:39):
I talk about post traumatic slave syndrome, I'm not talking
about a single trauma. I'm not even talking about a
clinical diagnosis, because a clinical diagnosis means that we could
get you some medication, get you in the room, people
talk to you softly couple of times a week, help
you out with that. Postraumatic slave syndrome requires much more
than that. It requires social justice. You gotta stop hitting me.
(11:59):
That's one, and the trauma itself reflects itself in what
I call social learning. So let me explain the difference.
So epigenetics that you know, if if something is showing
up as markers on your DNA, you know, once is there,
you can do something. You can actually change the trajectory.
And I'll talk about that. But there's something else that
(12:19):
we do, and that is called social learning. Social learning
theory looks at how we are influenced by everyone around us.
So for you, if if you learned to cook, or
if I learned to cook, and I know who I
learned to cook from. I learned to cook from my mother.
My mother learned to cook from her mother. So I
(12:41):
begin to do some of the things through my social
learning that my mother did, right, So that's a social
learning phenomena. Now let's put it in an advantage point
of trauma. Okay, there is a door and at that
door there are guards, and if anyone goes to the door,
they beat them down. After a while, you know, folks
(13:04):
stop going to the door because they don't want to
get beaten down or killed. But I'm learning also from
those people in my environment. So if you are my champion.
If you're the person I'm looking up to, and you
won't go through the door, I then vicariously learn a
helplessness that says, well, if my hero, my you know,
the person that that raised me won't go through the door,
(13:25):
I'm not going through the door. If this is called
learned helplessness, learned helplessness as well, you know I nobody's
going through I'm not. There's nothing over there anyway, Why
does anybody when we start making up reasons why we
don't go through the door, But the opposite is also true.
You can confound that because if you go through the door,
then I go, well, if if she can go through
(13:47):
the door, then I can go through the door. And
so what we have is social learning which can end
up being learned helplessness, which began with animals. They took dogs,
they put them in an h in a fenced area,
turned on a red light. Every time the light came on,
they shocked the dog wherever they were. Then, after all,
you didn't need the shock, you didn't need the reinforcement.
(14:09):
The light would come on, dog would move. Then they
just wanted to see, let's just shock the dog arbitrarily,
whether the light is on or not. The dog will
lie down, it will no longer move because it learns
that no matter what I do, it won't change the outcome.
That's learned helplessness. And we can learn to be helpless
if we're in an environment where we are consistently put
(14:32):
upon by these hostile behaviors, and then we we model
that behavior for our children. That's modeling, that's not that's
not epigenetic that that is what we're learning. But then
on top of that we have epigenetic transference or trauma. Wow,
that's really deep. And then what that makes me think
of two are the systems that teach us that no
(14:54):
matter what we do, we're still going to be in
the same circumstances no matter who we vote for democratic
public and they've all been bought by corporate interests, so
it doesn't really matter, and so we don't vote and
we feel helpless, and it's just pick up to this cycle.
So I mean, I think the piece though, for me
with epic genetics, with post traumatic slave syndrome, what is
(15:15):
the conversation so that we don't take postmatic slave syndrome
and say I'm a victim forever and there's nothing we
can do, but take that as an understanding, as a
way to heal and understand that we can be agents
in our own life. Absolutely, And when I wrote post traumatic, originally,
you know, my whole focus is healing. And you can't
heal what you don't understand. Amen, And you most certainly
aren't going to stop behaviors that you have come to
(15:38):
accept as normal, just like we began to you know,
in Isabel Wokerson's statement that you began to accept all
of the problems, you adapt to them, you adopt them,
and you begin to realize or believe that this is
how life has to be. And what I do is
I give people. I said, let's examine what we've learned,
(16:00):
let's examine why I behave the way I behave, and
let's make a decision about you know, God blessing my parents.
They gave us the best that they could given what
they had. But there there are some things that my
parents did taught that I did not share with my kids.
I didn't raise them that way. I had a different experience,
a different perception of the world. And I think post
(16:23):
traumatic helps people, um remember where we came from. Right
If we think this is not nowhere close to as
deep as it's been. So I know we can move
beyond this, but we have to again as we move forward,
we have to do it intentionally. We have to lean
in in a way and and say, well, you know, uh,
do I want to call people out of their name
(16:44):
like that? Do I want to assess black people in
this way as a total pathological group of people? Do
I what? What? What is it that I've learned even
from people we love that I don't want to maybe
continue on we aren't really necessarily exam I'm in in
those parts of our lives to say, you know, again,
I know my family gave me the best they could,
(17:05):
but there were some gaps there that I had to
make some decisions about with regard to my own children.
So I'll give you an example of something that happened
there was amazing my when I was a little girl,
I remember being so small. I'm looking up at my
grandmother's hand, so I'm I'm gotta be a toddler, right,
maybe three maximum. And I noticed that when my grandmother
(17:29):
was upset, she always had an apron off and she
would be holding the edge of that apron in her hand,
just holding it tight and she didn't even know it.
She wouldn't even know she's doing it. But what got
internalized in me is something's wrong. Because I didn't have
I was maybe even pre verbal. I'm just all I
know is when I see that hand type, something's wrong
with grandma. My mother did it. My mother's sister didn't.
(17:53):
Years later, I would find myself this is an absolute truth.
I'd find myself after a lecture. You see this, a
little ball, a piece of tissue. It would be in
my hand. I wouldn't know when it got there, and
I never let go of it. And I was like, wow,
I wasn't holding the side of my dress like my
mom or my my grandmother or my aunt. But I
(18:15):
had that balled up tissue in my hand. So I
called my sister who's older to be right. And I
called my sister and she said, you too. I found
out my daughter did it, my daughter. But once my
sister and I found out about it, talked about it,
began to do some things to change it. We said, okay,
(18:37):
I'm gonna zip up the pocket or do something, but
we're not gonna be holding Now. I understand holding the tissue.
You ain't gonna hurt me. It's not one way or another.
But I'm trying to show how things get transmitted without
you even consciously knowing it. My granddaughter does not do it,
my grand and part of what happened. You remember, what
gets internalized, its stressed. That's what I learned. That's what
(18:58):
I internalized from my grandmother. Something's wrong. It's something stressful.
And when things were stressful, my grandmother, my mother, and
my aunt, I did it, and clearly I did it
enough for my daughter to get it, but she didn't
do it enough for her daughter to get it. In
other words, the stress or however we interpreted it, changed
(19:20):
along the way, but sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it
gets worse. And it's not a piece of tissue, right,
It's a behavior, it's a word you say, it's an assault.
It could be any number of things that I'm saying.
We have to pay attention to those things to make
certain that they're not something that we are unwittingly passing along. Now,
(19:42):
good news, good news about epigenetics, which I really you know,
I've been really geeked about. Is they were talking about telomeres.
I'm not gonna even get into it gets thick in
terms of these telomeres and the protection of your DNA
and all that. But they've said that what helps people
change and regrow healthy cells and healthy telemeres is to
(20:07):
actually pay attention to the way you're thinking. Your actual
mindfulness exactly presents practicing being present, not running from things. Right,
So when I look at black people, it's a lasting
in the world. I ever consider that we are victims?
Are you kidding me? For me? Even when I deal
(20:29):
with other people of color? You know, if listen, let's
let's be plain about this. A lot of people walked
in the door that we knocked down. Are you with me?
We knocked down, we were water holes, we were dogs,
and lynchings and beatings. We knocked on those doors. And
(20:50):
what that says to me is that's what we're gonna
do whenever this happens, whenever it occurs, we are going
to show up for ourselves and for each other and
to the benefit of everybody else. To be perfectly honest,
when we start looking at things like civil rights. So
you know, I think, and I'm not suggesting there weren't
people that were involved, but come on, we know, knock
(21:10):
down the door and the cost of knocking down that door.
So yeah, we we we have things that we have
to deal with, I mean any group, and we are
human beings, so certainly three years of slavery produce injury.
Con you know, we're humans absolutely, And what you say
so much in your in your work, in your research
(21:30):
is that those injuries have continued right through sharecropping, through
Jim Crow, through math, incarceration, et cetera. That the injuries continue.
How's that for a little truth after a tiny little break,
We've got so much more for you. Let's get back
(21:54):
to our chat, back to the piece around, because we
talk a lot about trauma on this podcast. I'm really
interested in trauma resilience, and um, I've interviewed my therapist
Jennifer burten Flyer about trauma and trauma resilience, and she says,
the body can experience good things as well as challenging things.
It's too much, too fast, too soon, and that, um,
it's not just about understanding trauma is something horrible has
(22:16):
happened to us. But those stressors that you allude to
when you're grabbing that bald up piece of paper, and
the way to sort of, you know, begin to alleviate
that is to build resilience to these behaviors, having an
awareness of it, and having a sort of set of
things that we can do to sort of alleviate all
of those things. So with post traumatic slave syndrome, right,
(22:39):
what's deep for me at this historical moment is that,
like one, you can turn on the television or go
on the internet and to see people saying that structural
racism doesn't exist, that white supremacy isn't a thing in
the United States, that Black people need to get over slavery,
that we're just being you know, all these all these
things that people say that invalidates the experiences of black
(23:02):
folks not owning the history, the real history of what
happened in the United States. And I love your work
too because you say that white folks also have post
traumatic slay syndrome, right, That that white folks were involved
in this and the dehumanization of black folks, that white
folks lost their humanity as well. So what ine with
(23:23):
all of this through disinformation going on around reality and history,
what do you have to say to that, do we
just keep pushing back and telling the truth and with
love and empathy or what girl? Well, that was a
lot um and you know what, no, no, no, uh. Well,
(23:43):
first of all, I believe that we have to always
speak the truth. I believe that truthfulness is a foundation
of all human virtue, that if you're not truthful, you
cannot be well. In America's pathology is her denial. And
so part of what we have to do is continue
to bring these things to the light. I mean, it's
it's an eventuality. In other words, it's it's inevitable. Unity
(24:07):
and oneness as a species is an inevitability, whether it's
going to be something pretty horrific that gets us there
or an act of will um, that's what's before us.
But it's inevitable. And what I mean by that is
it's like when the tobacco industry, for example, during an
I was a little kid, I used to go buy
segress for a body in neighborhood. By the way, I
was like eight, and the right to know, give me
(24:29):
the little running the store, get Salem's Winston, you know, Chesterfield,
all of that. I was eight. And now I just listen, Lavery.
I believe right now I've been on a gazillion zooms.
That's no doubt you have also, and I've never even
seen anybody try to light up a cigarette on a zoom.
You understand me, you in your own house. It's so
(24:50):
outside of the of the reality. I used to tell
my grandkids, you know how we have special ash trays
for the holidays and all this, and they're laughing. They
don't even know what ash tray is. So how do
we move from me at eight years old running to
the store getting cigarettes to the point now where if
someone lit up a cigarette in a room, I think
the peer pressure, but put the cigarette out, And if
I didn't do it, we start psychoanalyzing them, and they
(25:11):
did someone dyeing the family? What's wrong with you? You
have lit up a cigarette? How did that happen? How
did we see people? We know what happened, And there
was a paradigm shift so much so, I mean, here
I am. I grew up with when there was a
smoking section of airplanes, which is insane, and and I
remember how you know, all of a sudden there was
a switch, and what happened was a preponderance of evidence.
(25:36):
In other words, there was so much evidence that it
forced the paradigm shift. And you see racism, anti blackness,
all these things we're seeing there is a preponderance of
evidence and different than any other time in history. You
can push your button and see it in lifetime. I'm
not waiting for ABC or NBC or somebody else to
(25:56):
tell me. I can see it in real time. And
because of that is causing too much cognitive dissonance, too
much dissonance, and the human being that goes. I can't
I know this. I can't I know it, And I've
got to make a determination. I said, I said this
a while ago, that they're gonna look back at this
time and they're gonna look at you and I and
(26:16):
everyone else, and they're gonna say, what side of history
where you want? Because history is happening right now, History
is being made. But what side of history are you on?
You know? And like I said, with black people, it's
it's always amazing to me how it is people always
tell black folks to get over it. Oy tell black
people get over it. Oh get over I dare you
(26:37):
to tell someone Jewish to get over their Holocaust. I
dare you to do it. I dare you. And what
I know about the Jewish community, having worked with the
Jewish community for many, many years, is they don't care
what you think. Okay, First of all, they honor their
holocausts how much so that they want their children to
know who paid for them. It's just so interesting. And
(26:58):
we're looking at people long try hundreds of years of
being tortured, beaten, mutilated, raped, sold hundreds of years, and
right now the world is being asked to to look
at its own humanity, to look at our intrinsic oneness
as as a people on the planet the little Blue marble.
(27:19):
You know, I look at post traumatic and what I
understood and what I see and what I also know
clinically it's post traumatic requires social justice. This can't be
fixed because we all understand our intrinsic worth and nobility
as human beings. That's great, but you're still hitting me.
You're still beating me. You know, I not only want
(27:41):
you to heal from things and to to reevaluate your
behavior and your decisions. I want you to do that.
I certainly want you to do that, but I also
certainly want to stop the processes from ever happening that
make you have to begin to deal with the injuries.
I want to prevent the injury. And perhaps that's repert
rations on a lot of levels. Perhaps that, but most
(28:03):
certainly involves structural and institutional change and sometimes of total reordering,
because you know, some things you can't fix. People have
talked to me about policing, of course, and my airbas
for these is actually violenced. And so I looked, I've
looked a lot at violence, and they'll go with you, Joy,
what do we do to to fix the police? Fix
the policing as policing isn't broken, it's doing exactly what
(28:26):
it was designed to do. Every system is designed to
get the results that against what we have to understand.
If we understand slave patrols, and we understand the history
of policing, you want your police officer you're biased. Okay,
you don't get to be in communities of color. You
can't be in communities are people you might harm. Except
(28:47):
for what happened at the Capitol. When that stuff came
down at the Capitol. You know those senators, all those folks,
they started vetting the National Guards, they started vetting them.
They said, wait, wait, we get ready have inauguration, all
we need to check to see if they may be
one of them. And they eliminated at least twelve of them.
Why don't we vetting. Police officers are coming to our community.
(29:08):
See they they knew the vet to protect themselves. And
what I think about a lot. You know that you
heard about the preschool and if you go online, it
went viral. Right now, it hit me a lot of
different ways, right, and all this stuff is really you know,
some of it's very triggering. But for me, I was
just I was so bad. Everybody knows that that's that's
Dr Joyce thing right now. Everybody needs to be vetted
(29:29):
before you put them in front of our children. So
what happened was it's a pre school, and in the
preschool they have these cameras and so all parents can,
you know, look at what their little kids are doing.
And a black parent checked in to see what was
going on and captured a picture of every Now these
are little bit of kids three or four years yearls, right,
every single white child had to play the food in
(29:50):
front of and not one Black child had to play
the food in front of them. Not one. And so
now again here's here's the thing. Here's what shows up
for me as a as a you know, I taught
a human development for a number of years at the university,
and I'm going so the children are learning something. They're innocent,
these children, the white children, the black children, they're innocent
little children, but they're learning something. The white children are
(30:13):
at the very least learning. We're special and they're learning,
and we're certainly more special than you. And then the
black children what gets internalized. They thought, oh god, we
must have done something wrong. We're bad. That's what happens
at that age. They begin to try to find between
their ears a reason for it, and they don't tell
(30:35):
their parents, they don't tell anyone because they've they've internalized
I have done something wrong. And that's what angered me
the most. It's shame, yes, it's shame. Yes. Renee Brown
tells his great story, UM the shame. Researcher Brene who
I always make this podcast, tells his great story about
the difference between shame and humiliation. Um. This happened in
(30:56):
her research where a teacher skipping back papers and says,
I happened paper here without a name? Who didn't get
a paper? And then Chrissie didn't get a paper, And
so the teacher goes on to say, Chrissy, you're stupid.
I'll give you a name. S t U p I
d And now if the child internalizes this as embarrassment
or humiliation, they'll go home and they'll tell their parents
(31:16):
this horrible thing happened to me. This teacher called me stupid.
But if the child internalizes it a shame, they don't
say anything to the parent because there's no news there.
The teacher called me stupid, I am stupid. And so
the way the ways in which we internalized shame made
me to think about the question that you alluded to,
you know, a little while back, of like the ways
(31:37):
in which we internalize these things as black folks, right,
and the ways in which that the psychic trauma of slavery,
of white supremacy affects us in terms of shame. And
so that piece of shame that it's very much also
linked to trauma, has to be addressed in us if
we want to not perpetuate these kinds of adaptive behaviors
(31:59):
that we been unconsciously passing down. Absolutely absolutely, you know,
I had many years ago, I was in New York
lecturing and I received a phone call from my oldest son.
And my oldest son has a taxic cerebral palsy, very
mild case, but you know, it's affected his whole life.
(32:20):
And he's calling me and he's really really really frustrated,
and he's and he's going, Mom, Mom, the police. He
was talking about his brother, not his brother. Um had
had was trying to meet him downtown Portland's Lord help
him downtown Portland's to give them give him his ID
which he had left at his house. And my younger
son at the time was nineteen and and so my
(32:42):
son sees his brother across the street, steps off the
curb about maybe twelve inches from the crosswalk, so you know,
like just right outside the cross walk, and he hears
a little siren and a police turns the car, so
he steps back on the curb. He doesn't continue to
he steps back, and the police officer gets out of
the car and says, improper use of cross wall. And
(33:05):
he says, but I didn't, I didn't cross what's your name? Right?
So it starts drilling my son. Soon two or three
more police cars come. Now, remember he stepped off and
stepped on, not our three police cars of a cross wall.
That is what it was. He told, improper use a
cross wall. Meanwhile, there's a couple, a white couple with
a stroller and a baby that just crossed the street
(33:27):
right in the middle street, and and my son looks
at the police officer goes, what what in The police
officer goes, police don't please, don't cross there. Oh sorry,
and they continue across and keep going. Now, remember I'm
three thousand miles away. Dr Joy's three thousand miles away, right, So, uh,
what happens is I know my my son is agitated.
I can only imagine the humiliation he's feeling. So I
(33:50):
say to my son, tell the police officer, uh, that
I'd like to speak with him. And I heard the
police officer say, well, I don't. I don't have time
to do. I said, tell him, my name is Dr Jeu,
he grew, I'm a professor porter sat University. So all
of a sudden he's got the phone. Well, um, uh,
you know your son was getting loud and making it
you know. He says, Well, what we'll do is we'll
(34:10):
let him go with a warning. Now, at this point,
my son is handcuffed in the back seat of the car. Meanwhile,
you got all the people you know, circling around him,
you know, the bad, evil, violent whatever. So the police
take the handcuffs off of him, at which point he
puts his hand in his pocket. All the guns are drawn.
(34:33):
Now you put him in there, so you know he
didn't have a gun, right, he reached in his pocket
to give his brother his I d that's why they
were there, at which point I start talking to him
and I say, listen, you don't have to say anything.
You don't have say anything. Just listen to my voice
and start walking. You and your brother start walking and
tell me when you're two blocks away. So he's walking
(34:56):
and I'm saying, listen, son, I'm telling him all the
things that I know that I could say. And after
two blocks he burst into tears and he says that
they're gonna kill me. Mom, They're gonna kill me. It
doesn't matter that you raised me. Well, it doesn't matter
that I'm a good person, Mom, it doesn't matter. They're
gonna kill me. And I remember that moment and I thought,
(35:19):
how dare you, son? How dare you? I said, there
were people that had a hundred years of slavery behind them,
and they were gonna look at two hundred years in
front of him. That's what they had to do with.
How dare you? Son? Say? Now at this point, you
cannot give up, not now, And he sucked up his tears.
(35:43):
He says, I'm sorry, Mom, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I
got it. I'm okay, I'm okay. And I cried for
two hours after that talk. I cried for two hours
because I'm I'm listening to the weight of what my
son is ring. And I had to have the presence
of mind to tell him about the shoulders he was
(36:05):
standing on. I had to tell him about those who
paid for him, and that we didn't go through all
this for you to get here and say what you
can't do. But I was shattered. You know, we gotta
walk through the world in this skin. We've got to
help our boys survive in this skin. We've got to
(36:25):
help our girls survive in this skin. And the last
thing they need it's someone that looks like them, you know,
it looks just like them, that begins to berate them
or or humiliate them, or shame them because of their blackness. Um, Jesus,
(36:46):
that story is still heroin. Can I ask you your
thoughts on because I you know, we were talking about
defunding the police, reallocating resources to some people want to
abolish the police, there's someone who's the police officers really
close to me right now, who I understand it's an amazing, sweet,
loving human being. People have police officers in their lives
(37:07):
who are amazing human beings. And then it happened to
your son, right and what happened to George Floyd happened
to him and Brianna Taylor and etcetera, etcetera. And there's
the history of that system and every political realities of
that system right now, what would you say in the
context of all of that. Okay, So again, I believe
that certain things are poison at the root, and when
(37:28):
we look at root cause analysis, then we have to
recognize that the healing or the change has to happen
at the root. Think about it this way. Every major
institution in America, every major institution in America has its
at its root, white supremacy. I don't care if you
want to be a doctor, I don't care if you
(37:49):
want to be an architect, I don't care what you
want to be. At its root, it's poison. Right. So
you have institutions, like you have educational institutions that are
literally they're really late in the game. Actually, each one
of them had their way of perpetuating it. But we
have always had to coexist in this reality. Right, these
systems are designed this way. For example, you look at
(38:13):
all the Karen's right, I mean, why why do you
get to falsely accused someone of something that could cost
in their lives and then you get to walk away
straight up live. We got it on on tape that
you're lying. Why do you not get Actually, I know
in California at least they put it out there it's
called the Karen Act. Where they are going it is,
(38:34):
I'm telling the truth. It's an acronym the Karen Act.
I'm not a certain certain word is in terms of
having made it through, but it certainly was was something
that put forth because I'm going, why is there absolutely
no accountability? My problem with all of this is that
there's no accountability. Like I said, you can deal with
the police and you can go so far, and then
(38:56):
you got the lobbyists, then you've got the police union
and the awards and all those folks, and ultimately it
all goes to the judge that could say, yeah, I'm
gonna dismiss this. Are you following me? So? So what
what I what I'm recognizing is when people start talking
about a fix, we're talking about a total transformation that
has to happen. And in some institutions that's something that's
(39:17):
easier to do because you have a board of directors
or you have certain people, and there's diverse voices there,
and there's power in those diverse voices. That's the crucial piece,
because I don't care about any of this if there's
no teeth in it. That's what I'm saying. I need
you to stop hurting us on every single one of
those levels. I need to take that power out of
(39:39):
your hands, because we're just one crazy political person, uh director,
you know whoever the person is in power away from
getting sent back twenty years. Right, everything we've built, it's undone.
That can happen at the Supreme Court any minute now.
And there's there's a lot of work that it's probably
(40:01):
going to be undone at the Supreme Court level. And
then we're seeing it happened in state houses where conservatives
hold most of the governorship and most of the state legislatures.
This is a good time to take a little break.
A lot more is coming now. Okay, Okay, we're back.
(40:23):
Let's keep the conversation going. What it feels like right
now is that there is I would say, post Briana Taylor,
George Floyd in Awakening, that a lot of Americans have
had of all races writing. We're having these conversations differently,
and there's different kinds of pushes around on racial equity.
But what I'm saying is the backlash is ferocious, and
(40:45):
what was once a dog whistle is now a bark,
and it is like the blatant white supremacy that is
just out there now is harrowing, and it's it's a
it's gagging. It's a gag, girl, it's a lot. I'm like, whoa,
this is just straight up Nazis that's being fed on
like national television every night. So we're at this like
(41:08):
it's like white supremacist last stand or something. I don't know.
I hope, I hope it's the last stand. But what
what is what needs to happen right now is like
it's the big structural change that I'm not convinced is
going to happen. And so what I'm buoyed by is
our history as black folks. Right We've we've been through
a lot, and we found a way to be resilient
(41:29):
and be amazing and awesome, but it is also really
scary because you know, inability to pass a minimum wage
or a pro act or an equality act so that
we don't go back there in lies. I keep telling
people that you have to recognize that there is a
last my father would say, the last gasp of a
(41:51):
dying dog. There is change in the wind. And we
have numbers. It's a it's a matter of numbers and time.
After a while, like I said, the inevitability is going
to happen. We are going to come to this. Now.
There are certain people in America that would rather burn
into the ground than share it with you. Okay, let's
be clear. They'd rather take it down. No one will
(42:13):
have it. And there's a fair number of those. And
we've heard people say, well, you know the police, you
know a few bad apples. It's not bad apples. It's
a bad orchard, right, And we have to recognize that
it's been grown that way. And if we are to
to move beyond this, we're talking about a change in
the power. Now, how much do you think it's gonna
(42:36):
take for folks to exchange that the hand of power?
Because that's what we're talking about here at the end
of the day. Money power, greed, That's how we got here.
And so you have a lane here, right, this is
your lane. Do do what you can do. Dr Joy
gonna do what she can do in her lane. And
I believe that all of us have that to do.
(42:59):
When I start looking act at all of our leaders,
all of those who came before us, I mean, I
keep thinking about the crazy stuff I've heard. You know,
my guidance counselor telling me I was in college material
with four degrees, told me I was told me I
got four degrees. I tell everybody. The only thing that
angers me is that she didn't live long enough for
me to go back and blow her hair back, you know.
(43:20):
But it was just the whole idea that my family,
you know, even though my parents didn't go to college,
they knew we were gonna go to college. But how
about that family that didn't. How many people did this
woman destroy? How many people did she harm? How much
shame did she produce? There was a yelled child study
(43:41):
program actually found a bias and like a hundred and
thirty five teachers. Right, so now we have evidence hundred
thirty five and and I'm not saying all those white teachers, right,
so you have the hunder thirty five teachers, they find
this bias. Now every black person, Latin next people. We
all sent our kids into the schools and we just
(44:02):
hope you're not gonna hurt him. We're gonna, we hope
because we remember what happened was but we just hope. Well,
here's where I'm different. This is my lane, right, I
got skin in the game. I got grandkids in schools.
My family tends to wrap themselves around the schools our
kids are in and show up volunteer. I'll train any
warm body you put in front of me. But here's
what I'm gonna do. When I go in and say, Okay,
(44:24):
Miss Wilson, I understand that you're gonna be working with
my grandson here. I want to know what you're gonna
do to mitigate any potential harm to him as a
result of intrinsic bias. Now. Ms Wilson may go, I
don't think I understand what you mean. I said, well,
here's the data, Okay I want to give I wanna
give it to you. I'm gonna give you. Here's the research.
Here is the current data. Al Right, great, now you
got that, and that's the piece. That is the piece
(44:44):
people really are pushing back against implicit bias, right, some
people who want to be in denial about white supremacy.
And what I really want to get through to people
is that you do not have to be a white
person to internalize anti black bias. You can be a
back person internalizing anti black bias and perpetuating that onto
other black people. Black folks are doing it all the time,
(45:08):
and if black folks can do it to ourselves and
each other, it is certainly possible. It's not plausible that
white folks are doing as well. So we have to
be willing to do that self interrogation and people. It's
just I wish people would wish we could get past
folks being so upset being called a racist, because it's
like that's not calling someone racist is not really even
useful at this point, It's like, how have I entered
(45:29):
the question? Really? It's like, Okay, I have internalized this.
How can I be accountable for the racism that I
have now perpetuated? Because we all are racist, We've all
internalized and that needs to become the conversation instead of this.
I'm not racist. I'm not. It's just it's not useful
and it's not true, and it's like we're not getting
anywhere exactly. I'm sorry, I just mbetta rant. I'm totally
(45:50):
with you. Some of the worst experiences I've had in
my school career and growing up we're black teachers. Black
teachers have said things to me that stung me to
my soul. And part of the reason why it stung
me so is because I expected something different from them.
And and again in this study, it wasn't all white teachers,
you know, it was a combination of teachers. So but
(46:11):
my point is, I don't care who it is. If
if it turns out you have biased, then you can
get your training and people can help you, and you
could do all that, but you don't get to go
in front of the kids. And and one last one
last thing I would say, in terms of interrupting some
of this, we've we've often normalized stress. And that's something
that I want to say to people that that's taking
(46:34):
away years of our lives, that level of stress that
we carry, that we've normalized, and to find those spaces
in the importance of touch and the importance of finding
spaces in our lives to exhale and and to feel
safe and warm and loved. We've got to be deliberate
about that, especially right now, so much negative stuff coming
(46:58):
at us, so many things that we're seeing in you know,
on the on the television and you know, YouTube and
everything else. We've got to really be intentional about healing
and about feeling good and and and recognizing this beauty
in the world. You know, my grandson when he was little,
it was I think it was tray Bon that was killed.
(47:19):
I can't remember who was at the time, but I was.
I was having a moment and during the time that
I'm really upset, and I'm talking about the same thing
we're talking about now, right, keeps coming up and I
get a little he sends me a text and in
the text he says, isn't this a pretty lizard? Ema?
(47:40):
They call me Ema, right, and it's a fluorescent green lizard.
And it stops me by tracks and I'm like, because
you see, he sees beauty in the world and I
need him, and so I had to stop and I said,
you know what, that is a really pretty lizard. And
we can't forget those moments you know, every and there's
(48:02):
so much beauty, so many incredible things Black people are
doing all over the world is definitely here. Miraculous things,
amazing things, and every discipline. Let's showcase that. Let's talk
about the good so that we don't get so weight down.
You know, we have to give ourselves spaces to be
well and to be loved and give love. And what
(48:24):
my daughter would say to beam loved, to be somebody
I love that I love to beam love. That is
what I'm I try to be all about. This is
a perfect segue into the way I like to end
every podcast with the question what else is true? And
it's taken from my own therapy, from the community resiliency
(48:45):
model and the shift and stay right that if I'm
stressed out or if I'm feeling anxiety and some part
of my body, um, some part of my body is
mutual or positive, and can I focus on that thing
that you think that's mutual or positive? That beautiful? You know, lizard,
So dr joy for you today? What else it is true?
What helps you get? Oh gosh, I have such optimism
(49:09):
and such joy associated with what I see around me.
That's beautiful. I see so many beautiful people. I was
so excited to be here with you. Right. This is
an opportunity to connect with another person that is in
their lane, that is beaming love and joy and light.
(49:34):
And that's what else is going on. And that's what
I'm gonna try and do. That's my name. My name
is Joy. I'm gonna try to be Joy. I love it.
I love it and love it where that's so beautiful?
Thank you, Dr Joy. Where can folks find you? Are
you on social media or joy brow dot com, Joy
Group publications. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook, you know
(50:00):
after join the group. So um, but thank you so much.
I'm so excited. This is so wonderful. I'm so glad
to know that you're doing this. Thank you and just
keep doing it. Thank you. Thank you for the work,
thank you for the continued work. Thank you for beaming
love today. Post traumatic slave syndrome a set of adaptive
(50:33):
behaviors that we've unconsciously passed down. I love that she
sort of organically leaned into the resilience of the history
of black people in America, that like, through all of
this trauma, right, all this intergenerational trauma that continues, that
we found beauty that we found joy. She She says
(50:55):
in her book that after emancipation, was their therapy was there,
like you know from you know, formally enslaved people, Did
they have sessions to like heal all these centuries long traumas. No,
that didn't happen. But we have the information now we
can do the healing work. Now we can use the
beauty around us to fortify us, to you know, reset
(51:19):
our nervous systems and not live in this way that
it's constantly normalized stress, normalized trauma, normalized maladaption. We can
interrupt those patterns. She does brilliant research that just lays
out the trauma of it. Right. We have to know,
we have just own this history so that we can
(51:41):
move past it. We can no longer be in denial
about the history of this country. And then we have
to go through the pain of acknowledging that truth, and
it's often really uncomfortable, and then we can come up
on the other side better, stronger, and we got some
work to do, but we can do it with joy.
(52:15):
Thank you for listening to the Laverne Cox Show. Please rate, review,
subscribe and share with everyone you know. Join me next
week for my conversation with California Surgeon General Dr Nadine VERG.
Harris about ACES adverse childhood experiences, how they affect our health,
and how we can overcome them. You can find me
(52:36):
on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook
at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time, stay in
the love. The Laverne Cox Show is a production of
Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
(52:59):
favorite show. Us
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with My Heart Radio. Now, there are
certain people in America that would rather burn into the
ground than share it with you. Okay, let's be clear.
They'd rather take it down. No one will have it.
(00:22):
And there's a fair number of those. We've heard people say, well,
you know, get the police. You know, a few bad apples.
It's not bad apples, it's a bad orchard, right, and
we have to recognize that it's been grown that way.
(00:44):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox. Last year,
for the first time, I heard the term post traumatic
slave syndrome. The moment I heard this phrase, I was intrigued.
I was familiar with the concept of epigenetics and research
that found that intergenerational trauma can quite literally be transmitted
(01:08):
through our d n A and passed down to the
next generation. I thought about my grandfather and great grandfather,
who were sharecroppers who were beaten on plantations and then
trapped and indentured servitude post emancipation, and the painful legacy
that violence and trauma have had on my family. I
(01:30):
knew I wanted to talk to the woman who coined
this term about her research and how we might begin
our collective healing from post traumatic slave syndrome. Dr Joy
de Grew is a nationally and internationally renowned researcher and
educator whose work focuses on the intersection of racism, trauma, violence,
(01:52):
and American childil slavery. She has published numerous peer reviewed
journal articles and authored her seminal book, Entitle post Traumatic
Slave Syndrome America's Legacy of Enduring Injuring. Please enjoy my
conversation with Dr Joy. Hello, Dr Joy, and welcome to
(02:13):
the podcast. How are you feeling today? I am well,
How are you? I'm well. I'm really excited about this
conversation today about post traumatic slave syndrome. Can you tell
us a little bit about your background and what brought
you to um coined the term post traumatic slave syndrome
and do the research. Yes, my background is I have
(02:36):
I have a degree in communications and I have a
degree in ms W social work. I have a master's
degree also in clinical psychology. I have a PhD in
social work research. So that's my educational background, but I
think it's more about my lived experience that really led
me there. Um, I grew up my families from Louisiana,
(02:58):
and I grew up with my father went to the
sixth grade. My mother could have a full scholarship to college,
but stayed instead and raised a family. But my father
called himself an asiatic black man. So blackness was something
that was okay with me. You know, I'm sixty three
years old, and I grew up with a real healthy
(03:19):
feeling about my blackness. However, you know, I grew up
in a time when folks were called negroes and colored
and all the rest. But I remember as a child
hearing other kids, uh, and and adults, not just kids,
that if they got mad at you, they say you black,
and then fill into blank you black. And of course
(03:41):
the assumption here is that adding black is an an
additional injury or an additional insult. And for me, I'm like,
but you're black, you know what I mean. So it
didn't make sense to me. And then, you know, I
started to hear things like, oh my god, you know
she was so pretty even though she was dark. You know, uh,
he was he was really attractive. He was light skin,
(04:02):
diad had good hair. You know, all of those things
I grew up with and in in in context, I
guess that makes sense given the time, maybe, But then
I continue to hear it. You know, it didn't stop
all the way up until you know, two thousand and nine.
I think Chris Rock made the movie Good Hair, right. Um,
So for me, it started there, and it started with
(04:23):
me trying to understand what the ideology of that. Where
did that come from? You know, I've been to seven
countries in Africa. It wasn't an African thing. I heard
it from folks from the Caribbean. In other words, I
started to hear it from folks that shared a legacy
of enslavement, which was a very different and unique experience. Um.
And what I mean by that is while slavery itself,
(04:45):
and this is what you know, I got considerable pushback.
Slavery itself is not a new institution. It's existed for
a long time. And when people get really tested, they'll
tell you, well, you people enslaved each other. And I
was like, correct, and so did you people? Right? A
matter of fact, most societies in the world had some
form of indentured servitude or or slavery. So I'm starting
(05:06):
to look at where did this come from. And so
I started reading slave narratives. I started interviewing the oldest
people in my environment that I could that had memory right. Um,
And on one occasion, you know, actually at Lais Sandford,
who was the vice chancellor of education in New York,
(05:27):
I was on a on a radio call. She actually
called in and mentioned something that her grandmother had said
to her. Now, Adelaide was up in age at that
and I think she's in her nineties now, but she
talked about sitting at her grandmother's knee and hearing her
grandmother recount what it was like during slavery. So, you know,
I had enough context to realize that what is this?
(05:49):
Where did this come from? So I have now a
context of where it came from. I even have an
understanding of some of the behaviors, and I examined those
behaviors contemporary behavior years that folks don't even know why
they do what they do, right, because our history has
not been readily available to us, and their history we
(06:09):
have is a bit distorted, if not outright wrong about
about black people. And so I mean that's where I began,
and I began really trying to understand how we could
really love each other and embrace ourselves um better, you know,
And so that that's kind of where it starts. But
when I talk about post traumatic slave syndrome, um, I'm
(06:30):
talking about you know, some of the adaptive behaviors that
have been left over. Uh. It is not about a
pathologizing black people, It is not. It is about really
trying to tease the poison from the cookies. I'm trying
to tease out what is healthy, cultural understanding, knowledge and
(06:50):
relevant from the poison, which was what we had to
do to adapt to being in hostile environments. The kind
of things we had to do not look people well
in the eye, and you know, diminish our children so
people wouldn't look at our children as having value because
we didn't want them sold. I mean, all of the
things that we did. That makes sense. But you know,
(07:12):
when you start seeing those those behaviors, you know, like
I asked, so what this usually gets me trouble? You know,
has anyone heard of anyone saying go get a switch everybody?
I mean, I spoke to a whole room full of
psychiatrists and all the black pikers raising the hand, I said,
how many of them had you get a couple of
them and they brayed them together. You know, people are laughing.
(07:32):
I said, how many of them? How do you have?
You dip it? Leave it in water overnight? And then
they're like, wait a minute, I said, you know what
that is? That is pretty much a whip. Right, So
you're looking at a whip that you've created to hit
a child, right, and it's behavior. And then in the responses,
but big Mama loved me, and I'm like, yeah, big
(07:55):
Mama loved you, and I look at me, I'm okay.
I said, yeah, you're okay. In spy it of it,
not because of it. We don't have to hit children
with parts of branches on trees, you know what I mean.
So there there was that sense of culture, you see,
But what is it? What is it? Is it really
cultural or is it adaptive? Mm hmm? What do you think?
(08:15):
You know, it's really interesting. Many years ago, Jamie Foxx,
when he won his Academy award, talked about his grandmother,
you know, whipping him and beating him, and he sort
of made a joke of it and used in a
lot of black folks, we make jokes about getting the switch.
Oh yeah, we laugh. It's a knowing laughter, but it's
traumatizing for a lot of us. What do you think
that laughter is about? Is it about trying to diminish
(08:38):
the pain of it? I think what happens. You know,
there is a wonderful statement by Isabel Wilkerson and her
book cast And and she talks about it in the
context of of of living in an old house and
getting used to the broken pieces and the you know,
propping up floors and leaking ceiling things. We begin to normalize,
(09:03):
do you see? We normalize it so it doesn't get
it doesn't get um really brought into our consciousness as
a trauma. Right now at the time it's happening is traumatic.
But what we do is we normalize those behaviors to
such a degree that we don't allow ourselves to see
it any other way. But imagine, just let's just unpack
(09:24):
that for a moment. I'm getting you've done something wrong.
I'm going to to punish you, and I'm gonna make
you go get the weapon I'm sending you to get
the thing to hurt you with. And so there's there's
so many implications of what's wrong with that, just the
whole psychological impact. Go get me a switch to hit
(09:48):
you with. Now again, seven countries in Africa, I didn't
see people wailing on children in that way. I'm not
suggesting that they don't somewhere and there, but that wasn't
the common practice that I have experienced and I've spoken about.
And I know there's an incredible violence. Don't get me wrong,
there's violence everywhere. But I think we have to take
into account. You can train uh elephant without hitting it,
(10:12):
you know, I mean, so, come on, we don't have
to hit children. You I'm talked about post traumatic slave
syndrome as an a set of adaptive behaviors. How would
you distinguish um Let's colleges pts S post traumatic slave
syndrome from epigenetics? Right when trauma is passed down through
our d n A and through our genes, is there
a difference for you between the two or is there similarity?
(10:34):
Are connected? They're connected, so that not everything. First of all,
let me let me kind of set up this this
reality around trauma, because people are talking a lot about
trauma in a lot of different ways, and there's a clinical,
you know, a discussion of trauma where you experience a
severe you know, someone threatened your life, or something violent happens,
or it could even be a natural disaster, whatever, and
(10:55):
it causes your body to go into a certain kind
of it or flight or freeze kind of behavior. Right,
So there's that reality. Now, we could both be in
the same room together, and let's say we're at the conference,
you and I. We're at the conference and someone um
shoots somebody in the room shoots him, right, and well,
(11:18):
we know one that person is traumatized. Probably the person
seated nearest to them might be traumatized, but not necessarily
because everybody is not traumatized by traumatic events. Not you
know everybody that somebody will go wh it was really bad,
it was horrible. Let's go to lunch. Right, So we
don't all we don't all have the same response. When
(11:39):
I talk about post traumatic slave syndrome, I'm not talking
about a single trauma. I'm not even talking about a
clinical diagnosis, because a clinical diagnosis means that we could
get you some medication, get you in the room, people
talk to you softly couple of times a week, help
you out with that. Postraumatic slave syndrome requires much more
than that. It requires social justice. You gotta stop hitting me.
(11:59):
That's one, and the trauma itself reflects itself in what
I call social learning. So let me explain the difference.
So epigenetics that you know, if if something is showing
up as markers on your DNA, you know, once is there,
you can do something. You can actually change the trajectory.
And I'll talk about that. But there's something else that
(12:19):
we do, and that is called social learning. Social learning
theory looks at how we are influenced by everyone around us.
So for you, if if you learned to cook, or
if I learned to cook, and I know who I
learned to cook from. I learned to cook from my mother.
My mother learned to cook from her mother. So I
(12:41):
begin to do some of the things through my social
learning that my mother did, right, So that's a social
learning phenomena. Now let's put it in an advantage point
of trauma. Okay, there is a door and at that
door there are guards, and if anyone goes to the door,
they beat them down. After a while, you know, folks
(13:04):
stop going to the door because they don't want to
get beaten down or killed. But I'm learning also from
those people in my environment. So if you are my champion.
If you're the person I'm looking up to, and you
won't go through the door, I then vicariously learn a
helplessness that says, well, if my hero, my you know,
the person that that raised me won't go through the door,
(13:25):
I'm not going through the door. If this is called
learned helplessness, learned helplessness as well, you know I nobody's
going through I'm not. There's nothing over there anyway, Why
does anybody when we start making up reasons why we
don't go through the door, But the opposite is also true.
You can confound that because if you go through the door,
then I go, well, if if she can go through
(13:47):
the door, then I can go through the door. And
so what we have is social learning which can end
up being learned helplessness, which began with animals. They took dogs,
they put them in an h in a fenced area,
turned on a red light. Every time the light came on,
they shocked the dog wherever they were. Then, after all,
you didn't need the shock, you didn't need the reinforcement.
(14:09):
The light would come on, dog would move. Then they
just wanted to see, let's just shock the dog arbitrarily,
whether the light is on or not. The dog will
lie down, it will no longer move because it learns
that no matter what I do, it won't change the outcome.
That's learned helplessness. And we can learn to be helpless
if we're in an environment where we are consistently put
(14:32):
upon by these hostile behaviors, and then we we model
that behavior for our children. That's modeling, that's not that's
not epigenetic that that is what we're learning. But then
on top of that we have epigenetic transference or trauma. Wow,
that's really deep. And then what that makes me think
of two are the systems that teach us that no
(14:54):
matter what we do, we're still going to be in
the same circumstances no matter who we vote for democratic
public and they've all been bought by corporate interests, so
it doesn't really matter, and so we don't vote and
we feel helpless, and it's just pick up to this cycle.
So I mean, I think the piece though, for me
with epic genetics, with post traumatic slave syndrome, what is
(15:15):
the conversation so that we don't take postmatic slave syndrome
and say I'm a victim forever and there's nothing we
can do, but take that as an understanding, as a
way to heal and understand that we can be agents
in our own life. Absolutely, And when I wrote post traumatic, originally,
you know, my whole focus is healing. And you can't
heal what you don't understand. Amen, And you most certainly
aren't going to stop behaviors that you have come to
(15:38):
accept as normal, just like we began to you know,
in Isabel Wokerson's statement that you began to accept all
of the problems, you adapt to them, you adopt them,
and you begin to realize or believe that this is
how life has to be. And what I do is
I give people. I said, let's examine what we've learned,
(16:00):
let's examine why I behave the way I behave, and
let's make a decision about you know, God blessing my parents.
They gave us the best that they could given what
they had. But there there are some things that my
parents did taught that I did not share with my kids.
I didn't raise them that way. I had a different experience,
a different perception of the world. And I think post
(16:23):
traumatic helps people, um remember where we came from. Right
If we think this is not nowhere close to as
deep as it's been. So I know we can move
beyond this, but we have to again as we move forward,
we have to do it intentionally. We have to lean
in in a way and and say, well, you know, uh,
do I want to call people out of their name
(16:44):
like that? Do I want to assess black people in
this way as a total pathological group of people? Do
I what? What? What is it that I've learned even
from people we love that I don't want to maybe
continue on we aren't really necessarily exam I'm in in
those parts of our lives to say, you know, again,
I know my family gave me the best they could,
(17:05):
but there were some gaps there that I had to
make some decisions about with regard to my own children.
So I'll give you an example of something that happened
there was amazing my when I was a little girl,
I remember being so small. I'm looking up at my
grandmother's hand, so I'm I'm gotta be a toddler, right,
maybe three maximum. And I noticed that when my grandmother
(17:29):
was upset, she always had an apron off and she
would be holding the edge of that apron in her hand,
just holding it tight and she didn't even know it.
She wouldn't even know she's doing it. But what got
internalized in me is something's wrong. Because I didn't have
I was maybe even pre verbal. I'm just all I
know is when I see that hand type, something's wrong
with grandma. My mother did it. My mother's sister didn't.
(17:53):
Years later, I would find myself this is an absolute truth.
I'd find myself after a lecture. You see this, a
little ball, a piece of tissue. It would be in
my hand. I wouldn't know when it got there, and
I never let go of it. And I was like, wow,
I wasn't holding the side of my dress like my
mom or my my grandmother or my aunt. But I
(18:15):
had that balled up tissue in my hand. So I
called my sister who's older to be right. And I
called my sister and she said, you too. I found
out my daughter did it, my daughter. But once my
sister and I found out about it, talked about it,
began to do some things to change it. We said, okay,
(18:37):
I'm gonna zip up the pocket or do something, but
we're not gonna be holding Now. I understand holding the tissue.
You ain't gonna hurt me. It's not one way or another.
But I'm trying to show how things get transmitted without
you even consciously knowing it. My granddaughter does not do it,
my grand and part of what happened. You remember, what
gets internalized, its stressed. That's what I learned. That's what
(18:58):
I internalized from my grandmother. Something's wrong. It's something stressful.
And when things were stressful, my grandmother, my mother, and
my aunt, I did it, and clearly I did it
enough for my daughter to get it, but she didn't
do it enough for her daughter to get it. In
other words, the stress or however we interpreted it, changed
(19:20):
along the way, but sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it
gets worse. And it's not a piece of tissue, right,
It's a behavior, it's a word you say, it's an assault.
It could be any number of things that I'm saying.
We have to pay attention to those things to make
certain that they're not something that we are unwittingly passing along. Now,
(19:42):
good news, good news about epigenetics, which I really you know,
I've been really geeked about. Is they were talking about telomeres.
I'm not gonna even get into it gets thick in
terms of these telomeres and the protection of your DNA
and all that. But they've said that what helps people
change and regrow healthy cells and healthy telemeres is to
(20:07):
actually pay attention to the way you're thinking. Your actual
mindfulness exactly presents practicing being present, not running from things. Right,
So when I look at black people, it's a lasting
in the world. I ever consider that we are victims?
Are you kidding me? For me? Even when I deal
(20:29):
with other people of color? You know, if listen, let's
let's be plain about this. A lot of people walked
in the door that we knocked down. Are you with me?
We knocked down, we were water holes, we were dogs,
and lynchings and beatings. We knocked on those doors. And
(20:50):
what that says to me is that's what we're gonna
do whenever this happens, whenever it occurs, we are going
to show up for ourselves and for each other and
to the benefit of everybody else. To be perfectly honest,
when we start looking at things like civil rights. So
you know, I think, and I'm not suggesting there weren't
people that were involved, but come on, we know, knock
(21:10):
down the door and the cost of knocking down that door.
So yeah, we we we have things that we have
to deal with, I mean any group, and we are
human beings, so certainly three years of slavery produce injury.
Con you know, we're humans absolutely, And what you say
so much in your in your work, in your research
(21:30):
is that those injuries have continued right through sharecropping, through
Jim Crow, through math, incarceration, et cetera. That the injuries continue.
How's that for a little truth after a tiny little break,
We've got so much more for you. Let's get back
(21:54):
to our chat, back to the piece around, because we
talk a lot about trauma on this podcast. I'm really
interested in trauma resilience, and um, I've interviewed my therapist
Jennifer burten Flyer about trauma and trauma resilience, and she says,
the body can experience good things as well as challenging things.
It's too much, too fast, too soon, and that, um,
it's not just about understanding trauma is something horrible has
(22:16):
happened to us. But those stressors that you allude to
when you're grabbing that bald up piece of paper, and
the way to sort of, you know, begin to alleviate
that is to build resilience to these behaviors, having an
awareness of it, and having a sort of set of
things that we can do to sort of alleviate all
of those things. So with post traumatic slave syndrome, right,
(22:39):
what's deep for me at this historical moment is that,
like one, you can turn on the television or go
on the internet and to see people saying that structural
racism doesn't exist, that white supremacy isn't a thing in
the United States, that Black people need to get over slavery,
that we're just being you know, all these all these
things that people say that invalidates the experiences of black
(23:02):
folks not owning the history, the real history of what
happened in the United States. And I love your work
too because you say that white folks also have post
traumatic slay syndrome, right, That that white folks were involved
in this and the dehumanization of black folks, that white
folks lost their humanity as well. So what ine with
(23:23):
all of this through disinformation going on around reality and history,
what do you have to say to that, do we
just keep pushing back and telling the truth and with
love and empathy or what girl? Well, that was a
lot um and you know what, no, no, no, uh. Well,
(23:43):
first of all, I believe that we have to always
speak the truth. I believe that truthfulness is a foundation
of all human virtue, that if you're not truthful, you
cannot be well. In America's pathology is her denial. And
so part of what we have to do is continue
to bring these things to the light. I mean, it's
it's an eventuality. In other words, it's it's inevitable. Unity
(24:07):
and oneness as a species is an inevitability, whether it's
going to be something pretty horrific that gets us there
or an act of will um, that's what's before us.
But it's inevitable. And what I mean by that is
it's like when the tobacco industry, for example, during an
I was a little kid, I used to go buy
segress for a body in neighborhood. By the way, I
was like eight, and the right to know, give me
(24:29):
the little running the store, get Salem's Winston, you know, Chesterfield,
all of that. I was eight. And now I just listen, Lavery.
I believe right now I've been on a gazillion zooms.
That's no doubt you have also, and I've never even
seen anybody try to light up a cigarette on a zoom.
You understand me, you in your own house. It's so
(24:50):
outside of the of the reality. I used to tell
my grandkids, you know how we have special ash trays
for the holidays and all this, and they're laughing. They
don't even know what ash tray is. So how do
we move from me at eight years old running to
the store getting cigarettes to the point now where if
someone lit up a cigarette in a room, I think
the peer pressure, but put the cigarette out, And if
I didn't do it, we start psychoanalyzing them, and they
(25:11):
did someone dyeing the family? What's wrong with you? You
have lit up a cigarette? How did that happen? How
did we see people? We know what happened, And there
was a paradigm shift so much so, I mean, here
I am. I grew up with when there was a
smoking section of airplanes, which is insane, and and I
remember how you know, all of a sudden there was
a switch, and what happened was a preponderance of evidence.
(25:36):
In other words, there was so much evidence that it
forced the paradigm shift. And you see racism, anti blackness,
all these things we're seeing there is a preponderance of
evidence and different than any other time in history. You
can push your button and see it in lifetime. I'm
not waiting for ABC or NBC or somebody else to
(25:56):
tell me. I can see it in real time. And
because of that is causing too much cognitive dissonance, too
much dissonance, and the human being that goes. I can't
I know this. I can't I know it, And I've
got to make a determination. I said, I said this
a while ago, that they're gonna look back at this
time and they're gonna look at you and I and
(26:16):
everyone else, and they're gonna say, what side of history
where you want? Because history is happening right now, History
is being made. But what side of history are you on?
You know? And like I said, with black people, it's
it's always amazing to me how it is people always
tell black folks to get over it. Oy tell black
people get over it. Oh get over I dare you
(26:37):
to tell someone Jewish to get over their Holocaust. I
dare you to do it. I dare you. And what
I know about the Jewish community, having worked with the
Jewish community for many, many years, is they don't care
what you think. Okay, First of all, they honor their
holocausts how much so that they want their children to
know who paid for them. It's just so interesting. And
(26:58):
we're looking at people long try hundreds of years of
being tortured, beaten, mutilated, raped, sold hundreds of years, and
right now the world is being asked to to look
at its own humanity, to look at our intrinsic oneness
as as a people on the planet the little Blue marble.
(27:19):
You know, I look at post traumatic and what I
understood and what I see and what I also know
clinically it's post traumatic requires social justice. This can't be
fixed because we all understand our intrinsic worth and nobility
as human beings. That's great, but you're still hitting me.
You're still beating me. You know, I not only want
(27:41):
you to heal from things and to to reevaluate your
behavior and your decisions. I want you to do that.
I certainly want you to do that, but I also
certainly want to stop the processes from ever happening that
make you have to begin to deal with the injuries.
I want to prevent the injury. And perhaps that's repert
rations on a lot of levels. Perhaps that, but most
(28:03):
certainly involves structural and institutional change and sometimes of total reordering,
because you know, some things you can't fix. People have
talked to me about policing, of course, and my airbas
for these is actually violenced. And so I looked, I've
looked a lot at violence, and they'll go with you, Joy,
what do we do to to fix the police? Fix
the policing as policing isn't broken, it's doing exactly what
(28:26):
it was designed to do. Every system is designed to
get the results that against what we have to understand.
If we understand slave patrols, and we understand the history
of policing, you want your police officer you're biased. Okay,
you don't get to be in communities of color. You
can't be in communities are people you might harm. Except
(28:47):
for what happened at the Capitol. When that stuff came
down at the Capitol. You know those senators, all those folks,
they started vetting the National Guards, they started vetting them.
They said, wait, wait, we get ready have inauguration, all
we need to check to see if they may be
one of them. And they eliminated at least twelve of them.
Why don't we vetting. Police officers are coming to our community.
(29:08):
See they they knew the vet to protect themselves. And
what I think about a lot. You know that you
heard about the preschool and if you go online, it
went viral. Right now, it hit me a lot of
different ways, right, and all this stuff is really you know,
some of it's very triggering. But for me, I was
just I was so bad. Everybody knows that that's that's
Dr Joyce thing right now. Everybody needs to be vetted
(29:29):
before you put them in front of our children. So
what happened was it's a pre school, and in the
preschool they have these cameras and so all parents can,
you know, look at what their little kids are doing.
And a black parent checked in to see what was
going on and captured a picture of every Now these
are little bit of kids three or four years yearls, right,
every single white child had to play the food in
(29:50):
front of and not one Black child had to play
the food in front of them. Not one. And so
now again here's here's the thing. Here's what shows up
for me as a as a you know, I taught
a human development for a number of years at the university,
and I'm going so the children are learning something. They're innocent,
these children, the white children, the black children, they're innocent
little children, but they're learning something. The white children are
(30:13):
at the very least learning. We're special and they're learning,
and we're certainly more special than you. And then the
black children what gets internalized. They thought, oh god, we
must have done something wrong. We're bad. That's what happens
at that age. They begin to try to find between
their ears a reason for it, and they don't tell
(30:35):
their parents, they don't tell anyone because they've they've internalized
I have done something wrong. And that's what angered me
the most. It's shame, yes, it's shame. Yes. Renee Brown
tells his great story, UM the shame. Researcher Brene who
I always make this podcast, tells his great story about
the difference between shame and humiliation. Um. This happened in
(30:56):
her research where a teacher skipping back papers and says,
I happened paper here without a name? Who didn't get
a paper? And then Chrissie didn't get a paper, And
so the teacher goes on to say, Chrissy, you're stupid.
I'll give you a name. S t U p I
d And now if the child internalizes this as embarrassment
or humiliation, they'll go home and they'll tell their parents
(31:16):
this horrible thing happened to me. This teacher called me stupid.
But if the child internalizes it a shame, they don't
say anything to the parent because there's no news there.
The teacher called me stupid, I am stupid. And so
the way the ways in which we internalized shame made
me to think about the question that you alluded to,
you know, a little while back, of like the ways
(31:37):
in which we internalize these things as black folks, right,
and the ways in which that the psychic trauma of slavery,
of white supremacy affects us in terms of shame. And
so that piece of shame that it's very much also
linked to trauma, has to be addressed in us if
we want to not perpetuate these kinds of adaptive behaviors
(31:59):
that we been unconsciously passing down. Absolutely absolutely, you know,
I had many years ago, I was in New York
lecturing and I received a phone call from my oldest son.
And my oldest son has a taxic cerebral palsy, very
mild case, but you know, it's affected his whole life.
(32:20):
And he's calling me and he's really really really frustrated,
and he's and he's going, Mom, Mom, the police. He
was talking about his brother, not his brother. Um had
had was trying to meet him downtown Portland's Lord help
him downtown Portland's to give them give him his ID
which he had left at his house. And my younger
son at the time was nineteen and and so my
(32:42):
son sees his brother across the street, steps off the
curb about maybe twelve inches from the crosswalk, so you know,
like just right outside the cross walk, and he hears
a little siren and a police turns the car, so
he steps back on the curb. He doesn't continue to
he steps back, and the police officer gets out of
the car and says, improper use of cross wall. And
(33:05):
he says, but I didn't, I didn't cross what's your name? Right?
So it starts drilling my son. Soon two or three
more police cars come. Now, remember he stepped off and
stepped on, not our three police cars of a cross wall.
That is what it was. He told, improper use a
cross wall. Meanwhile, there's a couple, a white couple with
a stroller and a baby that just crossed the street
(33:27):
right in the middle street, and and my son looks
at the police officer goes, what what in The police
officer goes, police don't please, don't cross there. Oh sorry,
and they continue across and keep going. Now, remember I'm
three thousand miles away. Dr Joy's three thousand miles away, right, So, uh,
what happens is I know my my son is agitated.
I can only imagine the humiliation he's feeling. So I
(33:50):
say to my son, tell the police officer, uh, that
I'd like to speak with him. And I heard the
police officer say, well, I don't. I don't have time
to do. I said, tell him, my name is Dr Jeu,
he grew, I'm a professor porter sat University. So all
of a sudden he's got the phone. Well, um, uh,
you know your son was getting loud and making it
you know. He says, Well, what we'll do is we'll
(34:10):
let him go with a warning. Now, at this point,
my son is handcuffed in the back seat of the car. Meanwhile,
you got all the people you know, circling around him,
you know, the bad, evil, violent whatever. So the police
take the handcuffs off of him, at which point he
puts his hand in his pocket. All the guns are drawn.
(34:33):
Now you put him in there, so you know he
didn't have a gun, right, he reached in his pocket
to give his brother his I d that's why they
were there, at which point I start talking to him
and I say, listen, you don't have to say anything.
You don't have say anything. Just listen to my voice
and start walking. You and your brother start walking and
tell me when you're two blocks away. So he's walking
(34:56):
and I'm saying, listen, son, I'm telling him all the
things that I know that I could say. And after
two blocks he burst into tears and he says that
they're gonna kill me. Mom, They're gonna kill me. It
doesn't matter that you raised me. Well, it doesn't matter
that I'm a good person, Mom, it doesn't matter. They're
gonna kill me. And I remember that moment and I thought,
(35:19):
how dare you, son? How dare you? I said, there
were people that had a hundred years of slavery behind them,
and they were gonna look at two hundred years in
front of him. That's what they had to do with.
How dare you? Son? Say? Now at this point, you
cannot give up, not now, And he sucked up his tears.
(35:43):
He says, I'm sorry, Mom, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I
got it. I'm okay, I'm okay. And I cried for
two hours after that talk. I cried for two hours
because I'm I'm listening to the weight of what my
son is ring. And I had to have the presence
of mind to tell him about the shoulders he was
(36:05):
standing on. I had to tell him about those who
paid for him, and that we didn't go through all
this for you to get here and say what you
can't do. But I was shattered. You know, we gotta
walk through the world in this skin. We've got to
help our boys survive in this skin. We've got to
(36:25):
help our girls survive in this skin. And the last
thing they need it's someone that looks like them, you know,
it looks just like them, that begins to berate them
or or humiliate them, or shame them because of their blackness. Um, Jesus,
(36:46):
that story is still heroin. Can I ask you your
thoughts on because I you know, we were talking about
defunding the police, reallocating resources to some people want to
abolish the police, there's someone who's the police officers really
close to me right now, who I understand it's an amazing, sweet,
loving human being. People have police officers in their lives
(37:07):
who are amazing human beings. And then it happened to
your son, right and what happened to George Floyd happened
to him and Brianna Taylor and etcetera, etcetera. And there's
the history of that system and every political realities of
that system right now, what would you say in the
context of all of that. Okay, So again, I believe
that certain things are poison at the root, and when
(37:28):
we look at root cause analysis, then we have to
recognize that the healing or the change has to happen
at the root. Think about it this way. Every major
institution in America, every major institution in America has its
at its root, white supremacy. I don't care if you
want to be a doctor, I don't care if you
(37:49):
want to be an architect, I don't care what you
want to be. At its root, it's poison. Right. So
you have institutions, like you have educational institutions that are
literally they're really late in the game. Actually, each one
of them had their way of perpetuating it. But we
have always had to coexist in this reality. Right, these
systems are designed this way. For example, you look at
(38:13):
all the Karen's right, I mean, why why do you
get to falsely accused someone of something that could cost
in their lives and then you get to walk away
straight up live. We got it on on tape that
you're lying. Why do you not get Actually, I know
in California at least they put it out there it's
called the Karen Act. Where they are going it is,
(38:34):
I'm telling the truth. It's an acronym the Karen Act.
I'm not a certain certain word is in terms of
having made it through, but it certainly was was something
that put forth because I'm going, why is there absolutely
no accountability? My problem with all of this is that
there's no accountability. Like I said, you can deal with
the police and you can go so far, and then
(38:56):
you got the lobbyists, then you've got the police union
and the awards and all those folks, and ultimately it
all goes to the judge that could say, yeah, I'm
gonna dismiss this. Are you following me? So? So what
what I what I'm recognizing is when people start talking
about a fix, we're talking about a total transformation that
has to happen. And in some institutions that's something that's
(39:17):
easier to do because you have a board of directors
or you have certain people, and there's diverse voices there,
and there's power in those diverse voices. That's the crucial piece,
because I don't care about any of this if there's
no teeth in it. That's what I'm saying. I need
you to stop hurting us on every single one of
those levels. I need to take that power out of
(39:39):
your hands, because we're just one crazy political person, uh director,
you know whoever the person is in power away from
getting sent back twenty years. Right, everything we've built, it's undone.
That can happen at the Supreme Court any minute now.
And there's there's a lot of work that it's probably
(40:01):
going to be undone at the Supreme Court level. And
then we're seeing it happened in state houses where conservatives
hold most of the governorship and most of the state legislatures.
This is a good time to take a little break.
A lot more is coming now. Okay, Okay, we're back.
(40:23):
Let's keep the conversation going. What it feels like right
now is that there is I would say, post Briana Taylor,
George Floyd in Awakening, that a lot of Americans have
had of all races writing. We're having these conversations differently,
and there's different kinds of pushes around on racial equity.
But what I'm saying is the backlash is ferocious, and
(40:45):
what was once a dog whistle is now a bark,
and it is like the blatant white supremacy that is
just out there now is harrowing, and it's it's a
it's gagging. It's a gag, girl, it's a lot. I'm like, whoa,
this is just straight up Nazis that's being fed on
like national television every night. So we're at this like
(41:08):
it's like white supremacist last stand or something. I don't know.
I hope, I hope it's the last stand. But what
what is what needs to happen right now is like
it's the big structural change that I'm not convinced is
going to happen. And so what I'm buoyed by is
our history as black folks. Right We've we've been through
a lot, and we found a way to be resilient
(41:29):
and be amazing and awesome, but it is also really
scary because you know, inability to pass a minimum wage
or a pro act or an equality act so that
we don't go back there in lies. I keep telling
people that you have to recognize that there is a
last my father would say, the last gasp of a
(41:51):
dying dog. There is change in the wind. And we
have numbers. It's a it's a matter of numbers and time.
After a while, like I said, the inevitability is going
to happen. We are going to come to this. Now.
There are certain people in America that would rather burn
into the ground than share it with you. Okay, let's
be clear. They'd rather take it down. No one will
(42:13):
have it. And there's a fair number of those. And
we've heard people say, well, you know the police, you
know a few bad apples. It's not bad apples. It's
a bad orchard, right, And we have to recognize that
it's been grown that way. And if we are to
to move beyond this, we're talking about a change in
the power. Now, how much do you think it's gonna
(42:36):
take for folks to exchange that the hand of power?
Because that's what we're talking about here at the end
of the day. Money power, greed, That's how we got here.
And so you have a lane here, right, this is
your lane. Do do what you can do. Dr Joy
gonna do what she can do in her lane. And
I believe that all of us have that to do.
(42:59):
When I start looking act at all of our leaders,
all of those who came before us, I mean, I
keep thinking about the crazy stuff I've heard. You know,
my guidance counselor telling me I was in college material
with four degrees, told me I was told me I
got four degrees. I tell everybody. The only thing that
angers me is that she didn't live long enough for
me to go back and blow her hair back, you know.
(43:20):
But it was just the whole idea that my family,
you know, even though my parents didn't go to college,
they knew we were gonna go to college. But how
about that family that didn't. How many people did this
woman destroy? How many people did she harm? How much
shame did she produce? There was a yelled child study
(43:41):
program actually found a bias and like a hundred and
thirty five teachers. Right, so now we have evidence hundred
thirty five and and I'm not saying all those white teachers, right,
so you have the hunder thirty five teachers, they find
this bias. Now every black person, Latin next people. We
all sent our kids into the schools and we just
(44:02):
hope you're not gonna hurt him. We're gonna, we hope
because we remember what happened was but we just hope. Well,
here's where I'm different. This is my lane, right, I
got skin in the game. I got grandkids in schools.
My family tends to wrap themselves around the schools our
kids are in and show up volunteer. I'll train any
warm body you put in front of me. But here's
what I'm gonna do. When I go in and say, Okay,
(44:24):
Miss Wilson, I understand that you're gonna be working with
my grandson here. I want to know what you're gonna
do to mitigate any potential harm to him as a
result of intrinsic bias. Now. Ms Wilson may go, I
don't think I understand what you mean. I said, well,
here's the data, Okay I want to give I wanna
give it to you. I'm gonna give you. Here's the research.
Here is the current data. Al Right, great, now you
got that, and that's the piece. That is the piece
(44:44):
people really are pushing back against implicit bias, right, some
people who want to be in denial about white supremacy.
And what I really want to get through to people
is that you do not have to be a white
person to internalize anti black bias. You can be a
back person internalizing anti black bias and perpetuating that onto
other black people. Black folks are doing it all the time,
(45:08):
and if black folks can do it to ourselves and
each other, it is certainly possible. It's not plausible that
white folks are doing as well. So we have to
be willing to do that self interrogation and people. It's
just I wish people would wish we could get past
folks being so upset being called a racist, because it's
like that's not calling someone racist is not really even
useful at this point, It's like, how have I entered
(45:29):
the question? Really? It's like, Okay, I have internalized this.
How can I be accountable for the racism that I
have now perpetuated? Because we all are racist, We've all
internalized and that needs to become the conversation instead of this.
I'm not racist. I'm not. It's just it's not useful
and it's not true, and it's like we're not getting
anywhere exactly. I'm sorry, I just mbetta rant. I'm totally
(45:50):
with you. Some of the worst experiences I've had in
my school career and growing up we're black teachers. Black
teachers have said things to me that stung me to
my soul. And part of the reason why it stung
me so is because I expected something different from them.
And and again in this study, it wasn't all white teachers,
you know, it was a combination of teachers. So but
(46:11):
my point is, I don't care who it is. If
if it turns out you have biased, then you can
get your training and people can help you, and you
could do all that, but you don't get to go
in front of the kids. And and one last one
last thing I would say, in terms of interrupting some
of this, we've we've often normalized stress. And that's something
that I want to say to people that that's taking
(46:34):
away years of our lives, that level of stress that
we carry, that we've normalized, and to find those spaces
in the importance of touch and the importance of finding
spaces in our lives to exhale and and to feel
safe and warm and loved. We've got to be deliberate
about that, especially right now, so much negative stuff coming
(46:58):
at us, so many things that we're seeing in you know,
on the on the television and you know, YouTube and
everything else. We've got to really be intentional about healing
and about feeling good and and and recognizing this beauty
in the world. You know, my grandson when he was little,
it was I think it was tray Bon that was killed.
(47:19):
I can't remember who was at the time, but I was.
I was having a moment and during the time that
I'm really upset, and I'm talking about the same thing
we're talking about now, right, keeps coming up and I
get a little he sends me a text and in
the text he says, isn't this a pretty lizard? Ema?
(47:40):
They call me Ema, right, and it's a fluorescent green lizard.
And it stops me by tracks and I'm like, because
you see, he sees beauty in the world and I
need him, and so I had to stop and I said,
you know what, that is a really pretty lizard. And
we can't forget those moments you know, every and there's
(48:02):
so much beauty, so many incredible things Black people are
doing all over the world is definitely here. Miraculous things,
amazing things, and every discipline. Let's showcase that. Let's talk
about the good so that we don't get so weight down.
You know, we have to give ourselves spaces to be
well and to be loved and give love. And what
(48:24):
my daughter would say to beam loved, to be somebody
I love that I love to beam love. That is
what I'm I try to be all about. This is
a perfect segue into the way I like to end
every podcast with the question what else is true? And
it's taken from my own therapy, from the community resiliency
(48:45):
model and the shift and stay right that if I'm
stressed out or if I'm feeling anxiety and some part
of my body, um, some part of my body is
mutual or positive, and can I focus on that thing
that you think that's mutual or positive? That beautiful? You know, lizard,
So dr joy for you today? What else it is true?
What helps you get? Oh gosh, I have such optimism
(49:09):
and such joy associated with what I see around me.
That's beautiful. I see so many beautiful people. I was
so excited to be here with you. Right. This is
an opportunity to connect with another person that is in
their lane, that is beaming love and joy and light.
(49:34):
And that's what else is going on. And that's what
I'm gonna try and do. That's my name. My name
is Joy. I'm gonna try to be Joy. I love it.
I love it and love it where that's so beautiful?
Thank you, Dr Joy. Where can folks find you? Are
you on social media or joy brow dot com, Joy
Group publications. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook, you know
(50:00):
after join the group. So um, but thank you so much.
I'm so excited. This is so wonderful. I'm so glad
to know that you're doing this. Thank you and just
keep doing it. Thank you. Thank you for the work,
thank you for the continued work. Thank you for beaming
love today. Post traumatic slave syndrome a set of adaptive
(50:33):
behaviors that we've unconsciously passed down. I love that she
sort of organically leaned into the resilience of the history
of black people in America, that like, through all of
this trauma, right, all this intergenerational trauma that continues, that
we found beauty that we found joy. She She says
(50:55):
in her book that after emancipation, was their therapy was there,
like you know from you know, formally enslaved people, Did
they have sessions to like heal all these centuries long traumas. No,
that didn't happen. But we have the information now we
can do the healing work. Now we can use the
beauty around us to fortify us, to you know, reset
(51:19):
our nervous systems and not live in this way that
it's constantly normalized stress, normalized trauma, normalized maladaption. We can
interrupt those patterns. She does brilliant research that just lays
out the trauma of it. Right. We have to know,
we have just own this history so that we can
(51:41):
move past it. We can no longer be in denial
about the history of this country. And then we have
to go through the pain of acknowledging that truth, and
it's often really uncomfortable, and then we can come up
on the other side better, stronger, and we got some
work to do, but we can do it with joy.
(52:15):
Thank you for listening to the Laverne Cox Show. Please rate, review,
subscribe and share with everyone you know. Join me next
week for my conversation with California Surgeon General Dr Nadine VERG.
Harris about ACES adverse childhood experiences, how they affect our health,
and how we can overcome them. You can find me
(52:36):
on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook
at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time, stay in
the love. The Laverne Cox Show is a production of
Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
(52:59):
favorite show. Us
Host
Laverne Cox
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.