Today I've seen a few threads about mental health in the ADOS community. I have some thoughts. Last year the pandemic took a toll on everyone BUT ADOS were set up to be hit especially hard. We always are. We already endure yrs & yrs of untreated trauma from racism.
The pandemic is the straw that's breaking so many Black Americans. We have been pushed to suffer thru w/o any type of address to the state of our mental health. Our SPECIFIC mental health issues rarely, damn near never get acknowledged in ways that provide sustained improvement.
Over the last yr, my daughter & I went thru the pandemic schedule changes, loss of friends, rearranged custody, divorce, deaths in the family. A LOT. I honestly didn't have the capacity to deal (alone) I didn't know what to do about how life was affecting us. I sought counsel.
Said in response to a whole population of hs students who collectively commited horrid acts of anti-Black American racism.
See below.
It's just like a white supremacists to say "Sorry, didn't know better, please teach me".
Parents + fellow students are demanded suspension. 👏🏾
White and Latino students at #Salinas high school made a IG page featuring images of them being violently aggressive towards a Black doll they named #Shaniqua
Apparently they didn't know this was wrong so they just need a racial sensitivity workshop.
These incidents clearly didn't stem from a singular, sudden idea. It takes a deep rooted hatred of Black Americans to cause something like this to spread within an entire high school. #salinas
Imagine the stupidity of boasting that you're in the upper class of Black Americans with less than $400,000 in total household wealth. The average upper class white family has almost $2 million. economist.com/united-states/…
After reading this I'm convinced of why certain ADOS have money while others don't. It's by the same design that plundered most of us. Some in the article have family money going back 2 right after slavery. That's not a sign of luck. Y'all weren't a threat nytimes.com/1999/03/07/sty…
The government knew y'alls people would take your money & run from Blackness as quick as possible. No reason to chase after them. Meanwhile these people got all the smoke. What's the difference between them and other rich Black Americans? A sense of collective empowerment.
The case for Black American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) to receive reparations from the US government stems from more than chattel slavery. It's the justice claim that ADOS should be uplifted to an equitable class in this country & be protected from ever losing that status.
It's also shielding ADOS from ever again dealing with the affects of structural racism. Examples follow. Over 250 years of forced free labor alone is worth reparations. But hat's not all. In slavery, ADOS were bred like animals & tortured or killed if they were caught escaping.
After slavery, ADOS were left to starve, forced into servitude sharecropping and domestic work. Jim Crow laws commenced to protect whites in theft, murder, and wrongful imprisonment of ADOS. Not to mention unequal segregation in jobs, education, social life.