Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Not A Lone Voice Crying in the Wilderness But A Lion with a Pen

 

There is an African proverb that says: “Until the lions have their own historians the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” I was galled and annoyed (to put it mildly) witnessing the September 30^th interview on CBS Mornings between acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tony Dokoupil. Dokoupil’s unprofessional questions and biased comments attempting to discredit Coates’ scholarship, CBS later acknowledged “fell short of editorial standards.”  

The truth of the matter is that the conclusions that Coates emphasized in his new book, The Message, and the assertions that many others have made about the Israeli and Palestinian perpetual war is far from slipshod, naïve, or parochial. All one must do is to examine past critical analyses and deconstructions of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and they will find that Coates’ assessment is not an anomaly. In fact, public criticism by Black academicians, sociopolitical observers and activists calling out the Israeli government (not its people) for acting as an imperialist hegemon date back to the 1950s. In the 1960s and 70s famous Black activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, and Muhammed Ali issued public pronouncements on the Arab Israeli conflict. In 1966, SNCC expanded its publicly denouncement of the Vietnam War to the Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people, which drew widespread condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitism. In 1967, SNCC used a summer issue of its newsletter to offer a searing indictment of Isreal’s violent Zionist conquest.

Black people in general have often viewed the Jews in Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza as special and unique cases with histories similar to our own in America. Many draw parallels of the violence inflicted upon innocent Palestinian people  today to the attempts to extinguish the Native Americans, the abhorrent acts of police brutality against Blacks, and the manifold forms of structural inequity and racism that have kept African Americans (in the collective) chained to its origin in America as second-class citizens.  Many Black defenders of the Palestinians’ right to exist under a two-state solution in Gaza did not come to that conclusion without first supporting and empathizing with the plight of the Jews. For many, their affinity for Isreal changed after the 1967 war when Israel defeated its Arab neighbors--Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to occupy the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights. It was then that many Black people would begin to question Isreal as a sympathetic and empathetic friend of Arab and African people and begin to see the Israeli political class as a byproduct of fascist and imperialists compulsions.

Russell Rickford wrote in his article “To Build a New World” (2019):

Israel itself was a product of Western imperialism, having sprung from the British Mandate for Palestine. Seeing Israel as a liberatory enterprise meant accepting the erasure of displaced Palestinians while reifying settler-colonial myths about the cultivation of a modern civilization on a barren frontier. Yet in the aftermath of the Holocaust, few Western observers heeded or even grasped these realities.

African Americans largely identify as Christian.  It is the Christian belief that the Israelites are God’s “chosen people” combined with recognizing that as descendants of slaves brought to and who built America that we know all too well what it feels like to be treated inhumanely and  perceived as the “other” in the only land we know. We view the Jewish holocaust experience and the genocide that is happening now to the Palestinian people at the hands of Isreal through the lens of America’s holocaust –slavery. However, it has been the tyrannical and inhumane decisions made by the elite political class in Isreal (not the Jewish people in the collective) with support of course of the American political elite, which have caused many Black people to side with the Palestinians and condemn Isreal.

From the past to the present, it is a shared anti-imperialist imperative that bind Black/African American to Palestine. The tie that binds us is a simple and larger world view shared by many comrades in the struggle against hegemonic sociopolitical systems built and sustained by race and class hierarchies, white and European supremacy, and colonizer ways of thinking, believing, acting, and being. It is not about hating Jewish people or being antisemitic like so many spinmeisters cleverly and deceitfully propagate. It is about doing what the sacred scriptures in both the Torah and Bible demand: “to do justice and love mercy” and to know that God has no respect of cultures or people. Our destinies and our histories are intricately intertwined. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

DEI and Cancel Culture

Racism Linked to Poor Brain Health among Black People and other Historically Marginalized Populations

 

Racism produces subtle brain changes that lead to increased disease risk in Black populations

Coping with everyday affronts comes at a cost and requires a certain level of emotional suppression. RyanJLane/E+ via Getty Images

Negar Fani, Emory University and Nathaniel Harnett, Harvard Medical School

The U.S. is in the midst of a racial reckoning. The COVID-19 pandemic, which took a particularly heavy toll on Black communities, turned a harsh spotlight on long-standing health disparities that the public could no longer overlook.

Although the health disparities for Black communities have been well known to researchers for decades, the pandemic put real names and faces to these numbers. Compared with white people, Black people are at much greater risk for developing a range of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and dementia. For example, Black people are twice as likely as white people to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

A vast and growing body of research shows that racism contributes to systems that promote health inequities. Most recently, our team has also learned that racism directly contributes to these inequities on a neurobiological level.

We are clinical neuroscientists who study the multifaceted ways in which racism affects how our brains develop and function. We use brain imaging to study how trauma such as sexual assault or racial discrimination can cause stress that leads to mental health disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

We have studied trauma in the context of a study known as the Grady Trauma Project, which has been running for nearly 20 years. This study is largely focused on the trauma and stress of Black people in the metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, community.

How discrimination alters the brain

Racial discrimination is commonly experienced through subtle indignities: a woman clutching her purse as a Black man walks by on the sidewalk, a shopkeeper keeping close watch on a Black woman shopping in a clothing store, a comment about a Black employee being a “diversity hire.” These slights are often referred to as microaggressions.

Decades of research has shown that the everyday burden of these race-related threats, slights and exclusions in day-to-day life translates into a real increase in disease risk. But researchers are only beginning to understand how these forms of discrimination affect a person’s biology and overall health.

Our team’s research shows that the everyday burden of racism affects the function and structure of the brain. In turn, these changes play a major role in risk for health problems.

For instance, our studies show that racial discrimination increases the activity of brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex, that are involved in regulating emotions.

Negar Fani and a team member view brain images. Patrick Heagney

This increased activity in prefrontal brain regions occurs because responding to these types of affronts requires high-effort coping strategies, such as suppressing emotions. People who have experienced more racial discrimination also show more activation in brain regions that enable them to inhibit and suppress anger, shock or sadness so that they can curate a socially acceptable response.

A cost for overcompensating

Despite the fact that high-energy coping allows people to manage a constant barrage of threats, this comes at a cost.

The more brain energy you use to suppress, control or manage your feelings, the more energy you take away from the rest of the body. Over time, and without prolonged periods of rest, relief and restoration, this can contribute to other problems, a process that public health researcher Arline Geronimus termed “weathering.” Having these brain regions in continual overdrive is linked with accelerated biological aging, which can create vulnerability for health problems and early death.

In our research, we have found that this weathering process is evident in the gradual degradation of brain structure, particularly in the heavily myelinated axons of the brain, known as “white matter,” which serve as the brain’s information highways.

Rendering of white matter fibers − shown in color − throughout the brain. Negar Fani

Myelin is a protective sheath around nerve fibers that allows for improved communication between brain cells. Similar to highways for vehicles, without sufficient maintenance of the myelin, degradation will occur.

Erosion in these brain pathways can affect self-regulation, making a person more vulnerable to developing unhealthy coping strategies for stress, such as emotional eating or substance use. These behaviors, in turn, can increase one’s risk for a wide variety of health problems.

These racism-related changes in the brain, and their direct effects on coping, may help to explain why Black people are twice as likely to develop brain health problems such as Alzheimer’s disease compared with white people.

Recognizing racial gaslighting

In our view, what makes racism particularly insidious and pernicious to the health of Black people is the societal invalidation that accompanies it. This makes racial trauma effectively invisible. Racism, whether it originates from people or from institutional systems, is often rationalized, excused or dismissed.

Such invalidation leads those who experience racism to second-guess themselves: “Am I just being too sensitive?” People who have the temerity to report racist events are often ridiculed or met with skepticism. This extends to academic spheres as well.

This continual questioning and doubting of the circumstances around racist experiences, or racial gaslighting, may be part of what depletes the brain of its resources, causing the weathering that ultimately increases vulnerability to brain health problems.

Interrupting this cycle requires that people learn to identify their biases toward people of color and people in marginalized groups more generally, and to understand how those biases may lead to discriminatory words and behavior. We believe that by finding their blind spots, people can see ways in which their actions and behaviors could be viewed as hurtful, exclusionary or offensive. Through recognition of these experiences as racist, people can become allies rather than skeptics.

Institutions can help to create a culture of healing, validation and support for people of color. A validating, supportive institutional culture may help people of color normalize their reactions to these stressors, in addition to the connection – and restoration – they may find within their communities.

Negar Fani, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Emory University and Nathaniel Harnett, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.