Much has been written on Post Vietnam Stress Disorder, Traumatic Stress Disorder, Delayed Stress Disorder, etc., but regardless of what this disability is called, persons with this affliction experience a great deal of trauma because they have not had time to grieve or respond normally. Instead, they internalize it and express behavior that is often antisocial, even pathological. Some years ago, the Veterans Administration recognized these problems and contracted with a number of agencies and individuals to assist them in helping veterans find their way back home. They created Vet Centers across the Nation that provided readjustment counseling, the Department of Labor funded programs that provided jobs and job readiness skills training, and they readjusted and integrated vets back into their homes and lifestyles. The nation worked its way through many of the problems veterans experienced.

But the behavior experienced by Vietnam Vets is not confined to them. Victims of trauma exhibit similar behaviors. The effect of trauma on the mind can produce strange and aberrant behavior. In treating trauma one looks at the multiple ways trauma has been imposed on an individual, the length of time of exposure, and the number of traumatic episodes one has experienced to assess the depth of pain, rage, anger, and pathology that may be present in a person.

A number of scholars argue that blacks have been traumatized for years and that there should have been some type of readjustment protocols for the many years and multiple episodes of trauma experienced by them.

It is true that ignoring a problem will not usually cause that problem to go away. And it is also true that people are generous with their pain--one in pain will try to make everyone around him experience and share it. Maybe both of these truisms are at work among some young black males. They have been traumatized and that trauma has not been arrested or addressed. Consequently, they are in pain because of that trauma, and they share that pain freely.

Some years ago, when I was a little black kid in Louisiana, my father owned a business. I would sell newspapers there on the weekends and after school. We lived near the railroad tracks, and my father's business was across town. I would hitch a ride on a slow moving train that went near my house, and it was something all of the young boys did. I was approximately 12-years old and alone, trying to get home by a route that was familiar to me. On a particular day an experience occurred that I would become so ashamed of that I would never tell my parents of it.

Seemingly, it was a Thursday, about 4 PM, and humid. The train was on the tracks and I needed to get home from selling poorly-selling newspapers. The train stalled all traffic on two major streets, so I hopped on the train to get home, and while riding, two policemen spotted me. By the time I had gotten to the next major street, they were there and ordered me off the train.

Any 12 year kid would be afraid when pulled over by the police. But the incident started off traumatically and did not get better. The two cops played the good-cop bad-cop routine on me. The bad cop shouted, "Hey, nigger, get your black ass off that train and come here!" He went on: "What you doing with your black ass on that train? If you fall and hurt yourself, you gonna try to sue somebody, ain't you, nigger?" Terrified almost to the point of being petrified, I said, "No sir, I wouldn't try to sue nobody."

The bad cop then said to the good cop, "Hit that nigger with your stick." But he was the good cop, so he simply excoriated me and said, "You little black bastard, I should kick your black ass for being on that train. What you niggers think you doing anyway, jumping on these trains?" I said, "Nothing, sir." I was shaking and crying inside and out. The bad cop then chimed in again, "Hit that Nigger wit the stick." As the good cop hesitated, the bad cop said, "Give it to me, let me whip his black ass!" Then the good cop said, "No, come on, let the nigger go, we had enough fun." They laughed, and I thanked them for letting me go, hiding my pain and humiliation. I ran away as fast as I could.

Although I did not tell my parents about this incident, it had a profound effect on me. I was thoroughly humiliated, terrorized, and demeaned to the point of tears and inner shaking. After about two weeks of a certain type of numbness, the stiffness of fear left me, and I felt hatred and indignation instead. I recall thinking that I have to get them back. I determined that if I ever saw them, I would step on their toes, if nothing more.

This incident is not peculiar to me, but it is repeated a thousand times and compounded on young and old black males throughout this nation. This incident represents one of the thousand pin pricks that greet most black males and continue to accumulate throughout their lives. And they live with them, but sometimes they don't.

Years ago, a New York Supreme Court judge put forth the concept that much of the violence coming through his court was not due to one cause, but a series of causes he labeled pin pricks upon the life of a person so that after a while that person is overwhelmed by life's adversities and explodes into violence.

This notion of violence is called Accumulative Factors Violence--the accumulation of many adverse actions and situations that degrade, enrage an individual, and deny the hopes and dreams of an individual so long until that person strikes out at anyone near him. Langston Hughes labels that reaction an explosion. (A Dream Deferred) When the accumulation of factors becomes so traumatic that a person is overwhelmed, that person cannot immediately respond in a normal manner, so he/she keeps the pain within until it can no longer be managed. The result of a person's inability to manage his/her pain is often pathologically and socially harmful behavior.

Most African American males have experienced the pain of discrimination, racial hatred, rejection, personal and emotional attacks, and the stereotypes that deny individuality and importance. Many have actually experienced physical abuse at the hands of police and "The System," as the bureaucracy of the Juvenile/Criminal Legal Justice System is called. And most who go into that system leave it worst than they were at their entry. This is the reality of our Justice system.

I have administered several group homes for boys over the space of six years old. One young man came into one of our group homes from the court system without any parental concerned about him. He was 15 years old and had been in the Juvenile Justice and Social Service systems for four years. When coming to us, his white probation officer informed us that he had been in many group homes, and he had acted out in all of them. "This little bastard won't be with you more than two to three weeks; then I will have him back in the hall."

This good-looking young man was the produce of a broken marriage. His mother had divorced his father and told the son to, "Never darken my door; I don't want any remembrance of your father around me." There was no contact with the mother, although she lived in the same city. The father was ill from Sickle Cell Anemia and told the County to take the child because he was too ill to parent him and that the child was too hard to deal with. This child had no contact with the father or mother, and he was in pain because of that. There was a grandmother who loved the child and was willing to spend time with him, but she died shortly after he entered our group home. This was an angry and injured child who was trying to cope with his pain, but doing a poor job of it.

This young male had a mask of anger to disguise the pain and loneliness he was experiencing. He had been an assaultive and combative young boy, and it was his assaultive behavior that put him into the arms of the Justice System. It was clear from our interview, and later substantiated in the group home experience, that no one had ever taken the time to help him enhance himself. The standard diagnosis the County gives to black and Hispanic males is usually mentally slow and borderline moron, and that was given to him.

No one had taken the time to determine his needs, his abilities or to work with him. He felt dumb, his school achievement scores were low, and his behavior in school was predictable--problematic (most students who have academic problems act out, and, if they are helped academically, they cease acting out). As a result of his poverty and the absence of true parental love, this good-looking child had dental problems that no one had concerned themselves with. He had a missing tooth that detracted from his appearance, and he was teased about it at school. A parent or caregiver should have had that tooth replaced. No one did, and this young man felt and saw his poverty and his unimportance every time he looked into the mirror, every time he went to school, walked on the streets, etc. So palpable was his hatred of his plight that he would look in the garbage to see that the meat used in the food we cooked at those homes was bought from the store, and not meat donated to the group home by the State. At school, he refused to eat lunch, unless he bought it full price--the group home could have its children eat at half price. His poverty and unimportance, although never attended to by parents or prior group home care givers, weighed heavily upon this young man and dictated much of his action.

This anecdotal case reflects the cycle of mental and physical trauma that many youths entering the Juvenile/Criminal Justice System have and are experiencing. Many of them successfully cope, but many of them do not. And for many of them, the pressure that is constantly increasing is much like tiny pin pricks into a balloon.

Alone, a single pin prick does not significantly alter behavior; indeed, it may not appear to be felt, although there may be some slight annoyance and slight alterations in seemingly minor ways--the change in a smile or its frequency, etc. Often the behavior is much like a tooth ache that is beneath the surface and dull: you know that it is there and you are cautious about its progress. As the number of pricks increase, there becomes a recognition of pain and a problem. And as that pain grows, it begins to ostensibly alter behavior and actions--for the young black male, general and continuous abstract anger may be exhibited. Then comes the thousandth pin prick that may be the final prick that overwhelms the person so that all coping mechanisms are unable to manage the volume and the size of the pain, frustration, and rage that exist. The result is that the person acts out in socially unacceptable ways to vent the inner turmoil--he/she may become totally irresponsible and/or even violent. It is those thousand pin pricks that go unchecked and un-addressed that explode into violent rage.

The young black male who came to our group home was almost thrown away. His parents had given up on him, his probation officer had given up on him and was giving us one last chance. He told us that, "This is a bad kid and he isn't going to get better." He didn't feel that we could really do anything with him. For this youth, the cards had been stacked against him. He was not supposed to succeed in life. Fortunately, we did not believe their report; we did not see him as they saw him.

We took that youth, stabilized his life, helped him academically, emotionally, economically, and physically; we removed him from the Justice System and aided him in believing in himself as a person of worth and not a threat to society.

He now knows how to grapple with the many pin pricks of life that bring about explosions of rage and violence. He has become a productive member of society. []


Frank A. Jones

Kids with Guns

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