For Black and Caribbean Americans, so much of the meaning of home has been ruptured because of slavery and what happens when people are forcibly uprooted from their homes.
Descendants from enslaved Africans most often lost that connection to their geographical lineage. It’s contributed to the inability of Black people to find cocoons in the U.S., some historians argue.
Black movement has been a constant for generations, and when loss defines your life, emotional health suffers, according to Brandon Jones, a Black mental health educator who is the director of the Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health.
Jones has spent his career trying to understand the trauma of losing one’s roots and the impact of racial violence.
“When I first started this work, I was like, there’s no way that Black people in Minnesota, St. Louis, New Orleans, Oakland, North Carolina, Atlanta — all of us — are randomly having the same experience,” Jones said. “I quickly learned that it is always connected to stuff that happened, either when we weren’t even present or born. There are outside factors that have led to Black communities being this unstable for so long.”
For the past year, Capital B has highlighted the contemporary causes of Black migration and how it is reshaping entire cities and states nationwide. What also kept coming up were the mental health struggles that sometimes come with the search for a Black mecca. We sat down with Jones to understand how the history of Black migration and the current migration impacts emotional health.
The following interview has been shortened and edited for clarity purposes.
Capital B: You’ve spent your career attempting to answer why Black people across the country seem to have similar emotional experiences no matter where they live. Have you found answers?
Brandon Jones: I think it’s multifaceted. Some of the core things that have happened is that Black folks have built a culture around responding to racism and white supremacy. And what I mean by that is, if you think about Black culture, from our music, the foods we eat, how we name our children, the religions that we participate in, to the places that we live, it’s all been in response to racism or avoiding racism. That’s a huge stressor. When your life is being navigated around being oppressed, that’s a stressor. Unfortunately, it’s happened for so long that we built and developed a culture around it. So we don’t even consider it a stressor because it’s just been our life.
But I also think that part of it’s dangerous because, at some point, we have to be able to move beyond the trauma and thrive as a culture. We can’t stay stuck in the pain. And so many of us can’t even think beyond that concept because our entire worldview is through a traumatized lens of being oppressed.
A lot of your work connects to Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. What is that?
The theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome was coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy, but it’s not a new concept. Other people utilize a similar idea, like Psychological Slavery, which was made famous by Dr. Na’im Akbar. But ultimately, PTSS is looking at what’s called the intergenerational transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. And it’s highlighting slavery as the beginning point of the traumatic experience that African Americans had and how Black folks, or enslaved Africans at that time, had to adjust to that condition and protect themselves. Over time, they built habits, customs, and values that were passed down from one generation to the next.
So what PTSS says is that there are a lot of cultural elements in the African American culture that started during slavery that show up today even though we are not enslaved. It’s not just the behavior that has been passed on, it’s also the mental and emotional piece, and the stress from our ancestors has also been passed from one generation to the next.
These stress hormones impact people’s genealogy and, ultimately, their genes. So that’s important because when you look at any stress-related disorders — high blood pressure, heart disease — and you break down those statistics, even today, by ethnicity, you get two groups who are always trading places on the top spots: African Americans and Indigenous folks. These are two people in this land who have had the most hectic, historical traumas.
How does that constant churn and change in the physical environment impact Black mental health? What does it mean, that when you look down your family line, every generation has had to move from their home for a certain reason?
If your environment is predictable, it is easier to support your health and regulate your nervous system. But when you have a lot of transition, both historically and immediately, this deregulates you as a person.
I’ve worked with families where they’ve moved so many times within a timeframe that the children have been to four elementary schools before they got to the fifth grade. Those children struggle academically and socially. They struggle building friends and responding to authority because they haven’t been in an environment where there is consistency, and they haven’t been able to develop any habits, patterns, or familiarity with their environment.
Black folks are often disoriented because they’re trying to find some stability after always being on the move. They’re always on the go. And that does something to your immune system and your nervous system at the same time. So, when it comes to African American folk, stability is very important. And we have been a very transient ethnic group in this country. Dr. Isabel Wilkerson talks about this in her book [The] Warmth of Other Suns, where you can see how we had the Great Migrations from the 1900s to the 1970s after Black people were starving in the rural South. These new Black migrants then fueled all these big cities and the growing industrial and manufacturing complexes, but what happens to this mass influx of what used to be rural African Americans? They become urbanized. And a lot of them get put into project buildings, these tall apartments, and they’re all living in these concentrated areas. That’s a lot of stress with new and unfamiliar environments and people.
So what ends up happening then, and what ends up happening now with the new migration, is that violence increases and mental instability flourishes. This is not a uniquely Black thing. We saw this when European immigrants came here, too. Even now, as these cities are being propped up, they’re not being built to support Black mental health or any kind of livability for impoverished people or unstable people.
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