Hello, everyone. This is Dr. George Woods. It is a distinct pleasure to be the moderator of the first in a series of presentations on racism by the American Psychiatric Association. I have the distinct honor of presenting Dr. Kevin Coakley, PhD, Director of the Institute for Urban Policy and Research, Professor of Counseling Psychology and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and he will be discussing the psychological impact of racism. We've got a couple of housekeeping things to do before he starts his presentation. Dr. Coakley, would you mind going to the next slide? Sure. We want to make sure that you knew that funding for this initiative was made possible in part by a grant from SAMHSA. The views expressed in written conference materials and publications and by speakers and moderators do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does the mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. government. That was a mouthful, but I got through it. Dr. Coakley, please. The American Psychiatric Association is accredited by the Accreditation Council for the Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The APA designates this live event for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 credits. Physicians should claim only the credit to measure it with the extent of their participation in this activity, which will be an hour. Dr. Coakley, one more slide, please. Thank you. We have uploaded, or rather those that really know what they're doing, have uploaded the handouts to this presentation. You will be able to find them within your presentations section. You can click the page to display the handout area. Once you do the incident and join the viewer or on desktop, you can use the handouts area of the attendee control panel. Dr. Coakley. And here you can participate in questions. Back one more. Questions and answers. I will be monitoring for any questions that you may have. Please hold your questions until the end of Dr. Coakley's presentation, and we will have time to go through what I think is going to be a really fascinating presentation. At this point, I'd like to introduce Dr. Coakley. This is very difficult because I could probably go on for an hour just on his amazing presentation. But let me just say that Kevin Coakley, PhD, holds the Oscar and Anne Mousey Regents Professorship for Educational Research and Development in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow of the University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers, Director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, and Professor of Educational Psychology and African and African Diaspora Studies. Dr. Coakley's research and teaching can be broadly categorized in the area of African American psychology, with a focus on racial and ethnic identity, and understanding the psychological environmental factors that impact racial American students' academic achievement. Dr. Coakley studies the psychosocial experiences of students of color and is currently exploring the apositor phenomenon and its relationship to mental health and academic outcomes. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Black Psychology and was elected to fellow status in the American Psychological Association for his contributions to ethnic minority psychology and counseling psychology. He holds a title of Distinguished Psychologist in the Association of Black Psychologists and is the author of the book, The Myth of the Black Anti-Intellectualism. I love that. That challenges the notion that African American students are anti-intellectual. He has written op-eds in major media outlets on topics such as Black's rational mistrust of police, the aftermath of Ferguson, police and race relations, racism and white supremacy, the limitations of de-escalation training, and critical race theory. His research has been recognized in media outlets, including the New York Times, the USA Today, and Insight Higher Education. I'd like to thank Dr. Coakley for being here and for presenting to a group that, in my opinion, has had very limited access to an understanding on race and race relationships and has done a very poor job in the past of acknowledging and recognizing the role of race in the work that we do. Dr. Coakley, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. Oh, and one more. No financial relationships are complex of interest to report. Okay. Thank you for that very nice introduction, and I hope that everyone can hear me okay. As we were sort of going through testing, I wanted to make sure that I got myself properly oriented. This is a format I'm less familiar with compared to Zoom, but we're going to hopefully get to this okay. I want to thank Ebony specifically for reaching out to me and asking me to speak to you all today about a topic that's very important. I've spoken to many different groups, including lawyers and judges, mental health professionals, and various businesses and corporations. I do believe that this is the first time that I've spoken to a group of psychologists and I'm pleased to know that this is something that psychiatry is very much interested in. So I want to go through an outline of the talk. I'm going to start off by talking about America's history of racism and racial terrorism. It's important when you're talking about the psychological impact of racism, you cannot assume or we should not assume that we all have a firm understanding of our history. In fact, what we sort of refer to as history is not simply history, but it's also contemporary in terms of the experiences. So I'm going to spend a fair amount of time really sort of going through some of our more unsavory moments of American history. I'm also going to include some more contemporary moments of our history. Contemporary moments of racism that we have unfortunately become all too familiar with. From there, I will talk about the role of police brutality against something that has been in the news and that we are all very familiar with. Then I'm going to talk about the impact of racism and specifically sort of the impact of perceived discrimination and its linkages to mental health. And then I'm going to talk about the notion of racism as trauma, something that several psychologists, Black psychologists in particular, have been arguing for and it has been slow to be taken up in the literature. And then finally, I'm going to end with strategies to promote social justice. I hope that this outline is okay with you. It is going to be what you get. So on that note, let us get started. I want to start off with playing this brief video. And this video, I think, does a really nice job of sharing one of the more unsavory elements of America's history. The use of force against peaceful protesters is exactly connected to this legacy of slavery. And of the massacre. The first shot rings off against a white faculty as he tried to disarm a Black veteran. And then all, you know, that's when the chaos broke out. And so over time, through the night, you know, shooting and killing, through the morning, where the governor declared martial law and National Guard troops descend in addition to local law enforcement and begin to take Black people out of their homes and wrap them up into internment camps. And that facilitated the destruction and burning of the Greenwood neighborhood. These communities were wealthy, wealthy Black communities that were thriving. And you look at Greenwood today, and if you walked, if you wanted to find Black Wall Street, you know, unfortunately, you'd probably be standing under the Interstate 244 overpass, looking like, where is it? You know, because it doesn't exist in the way that it did before. Greenwood was a, you know, Black-owned, Black-funded, Black-funded town. They did it themselves and without any help from the government. And then they rebuilt themselves after mass destruction without the help of the government. What does that say about us? And when, you know, when does the cutoff for oppression and injustice come in? Like, how long are we going to allow these conditions to bubble, to exist in a place where we claim freedom for all? Some people are not free in these systems, and we have to address that meaningfully and with the adequate resources. Reparations will not fix everything. It will not solve equality. However, reparation is economic justice, reparation is repair. And you have to repair things before they get better. The Tulsa Race Massacre was not a riot. What we're seeing today are not riots. That is inappropriate language that doesn't characterize what's happening. These are rebellions and uprisings against a culture of white supremacy, against an oppressive police force, police state, and also these converging inequalities that people, that Black people and poor people in particular cannot seem to escape. Slavery didn't end because someone was like, oh, we should stop, you know, exploiting Black people. It ended because people, enslaved people, raised up in rebellions against what was an oppressive and dehumanizing system. So I wanted to start off with that because it provides a very important context. You know, we're having a national discourse right now about race in this country. There's been a lot of debate about critical race theory. And one of the things that is being sort of contended is this idea that this country is not a racist country. We heard recently a very prominent Black politician sort of claim that America is not a racist country. And people really take umbrage. Some people take umbrage with claiming that this is a racist country. And so part of what we want to do is talk about not only our past, but also talk about our present. So I want to just share a little bit of data with you. When you think about racial terrorism in this country, nothing to me epitomizes racial terrorism more than the history of lynching that we have in this country. We know that between 1877 and 1950, approximately 4,075 Black people were lynched in the United States. I use the word approximately because we know that there were unfortunately many Black folks who were lynched whose records we aren't aware of. So these are just the documented cases that we do know. And of course, it should be no surprise to you that the southern states of Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana had more lynchings than any other state. And you can sort of see their listings there. The state that I'm currently in, Texas, finds itself on that list as well. But one of the things that you should be aware of is that lynchings were not limited to the South. Now I'm from North Carolina, and I'm well aware of the perceptions that people have about the South. And some people mistakenly think that there was only racism in the South. But lynchings were not limited to the South. Lynchings were of course used as a tool of white supremacy to inflict deep traumatic and psychological wounds on the entire African-American community, family members, witnesses, and survivors. And some people have suggested that while it has not been studied so much, it was psychologically damaging for white people who watched or participated in lynchings. Now, 1952 was the first full year without a reported racial lynching. But let me just sort of back up, because there were many public commentaries about lynchings. So for example, there was a 1918 lynching and disembowelment of an eight-month pregnant woman named Mary Turner. And you have to sort of ask yourself, what kind of culture would lynch and disembowel a pregnant woman? California Governor James Rolfe, in 1933, made a statement that lynching was, quote, a fine lesson for the whole nation. So I think that communicates very sort of succinctly how lynching was viewed as a tool to really sort of control and terrorize Black folks. Lynchings often had underlying economic and sexual dynamics, and it also affected migration patterns. So if you ever wondered, you know, why Black folks fled the South, well, we know that one of the major reasons was to escape lynchings. And in turn, many Southern cities, predominantly White, as a result, millions of Black people migrated to the North. Now, one of the things that I did not know when I, you know, first prepared this talk or this webinar, and I was looking into the history of lynchings, I was not aware that lynchings were not just sort of relegated to Black folks. And so what we see here in this map is a map of lynchings of different groups across this country. So what you see in what is orange would be lynchings of Black folks. And so not surprisingly, Black folks sort of dominated in terms of being the victims of lynching. But you'll see also yellow dots or yellow slash brown, I think they're yellow. Those individuals, those were Latinx individuals who were also lynched. And then you'll see red dots, mostly sort of on the West. Those were Chinese people who were lynched. The light purple dots would be indigenous folks, Native Americans. You see a smattering of blue dots. Those were Italians. I had no idea that Italians were ever lynched, not a whole lot, but a few. And then green would be other, for individuals whose race was not identified, but nevertheless, they were lynched. So this country has a horrendous history of using this type of, you know, just, you know, inhumane treatment. Predominantly of Black folks, but not just Black folks. I just want to go sort of quickly, I probably should have issued a trigger warning. I'm going to show some images that are fairly graphic. But again, it's important that you see them. We know that terror lynchings were horrific acts of violence whose perpetrators perpetrators were never or rarely held accountable. Some public spectacle lynchings were attended by entire white communities, and they were conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination. So here we see the 1930s. These are very famous pictures, by the way. Here we see the 1935 lynching of Reuben Stacy. And what's particularly, I think, striking about this picture is if you look in the background, you'll notice that there are four young white girls who are personally witnessing the hand of this white terrorism at work. And again, this is because lynchings were public spectacle. People, these white communities saw these acts as almost celebratory. There was almost like a festive atmosphere. And you have to sort of wonder what kind of mindset would think it would be appropriate to, first of all, to do this, but to bring your children to witness such a horrendous spectacle. Here we see a 1936 lynching in Georgia. And you can see members of the white lynch mob posed beside a dead body. Here we see lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. He was lynched in retaliation for a jury's acquittal of a Black man accused of murdering a police officer. And there are many, many lynching pictures that you could access. I just wanted to show just a few, just to remind us, in case any of you had ever forgotten or didn't know about this sordid history, sordid American history. But we know, of course, that this sort of racial terrorism was not restricted to just Black folks. And we know that Spanish-speaking folks have also experienced terrorism in this country. Here we see a picture illustrating anti-Mexican violence in Texas. And for years, the Texas Rangers indiscriminately killed Mexican Americans, including lynchings. And so you can read more about this history in the book, The Injustice Never Leaves You by Monica Martinez. And for those who insist that these were things in the past, that we don't really have problems dealing in this instance with Latinx folks, I would offer this video as a counterpoint. Civil rights groups are asking police to pursue hate crime charges against two people accused of attacking a woman and her daughter who were speaking Spanish in a Boston neighborhood. Iowa News reporter Caroline Goggin joins us now with their plea and more on the alleged hate crime. Caroline. Well, Shannon, a civil rights group says that acts of racism are becoming more common in East Boston, where the population currently stands at 56% Hispanic. Some people living in that neighborhood say they aren't sure why something like this had to happen. It was the night of Saturday, February 15th in East Boston's Maverick Square, when a civil rights group says this surveillance video captured a mother and daughter being brutally attacked for speaking Spanish in a strongly Latino neighborhood. The mother emotional as she spoke with reporters via a translator on Monday. She declined to give her full name to protect her daughter, simply going by her last name, Vasquez. She says her and her teenage daughter were walking home from dinner when a white woman, unprovoked, attacked them while shouting at them to speak English and go back to your country. She says they were punched, kicked, and bitten. Attacked them while shouting at them to speak English and go back to your country. She says they were punched, kicked, and bitten. They experienced a terrifying mix of racist verbal attacks, vicious physical violence. As you will hear from Ms. Vasquez, the two are inextricably intertwined. That's why this incident must be labeled and treated as a hate crime. The group Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston now asking police to pursue hate crime charges against the two people accused of attacking 46-year-old Vasquez and her 15-year-old daughter, who she says is still wearing a neck brace because of her injuries. The two women accused in the assault told officers they approached Vasquez and her daughter because they believed the two were making fun of them. Lawyers for civil rights also calling on Boston police to approve how they respond to hate crimes. The police should be doing their job, and they should be reaching out to victims on their own. And that comment was made because Vasquez says the police department never reached out to her or followed up about the alleged incident. Boston police say that incident is still under investigation, and because of that, they have no further comment at this time. Reporting live tonight, I'm Caroline Goggin, Eyewitness News. So attacks for speaking Spanish, and again, this is not, you know, something that happened, you know, years and years and years ago. This was a recent act of hate. Civil rights. So we know that the Native American community, indigenous folks, we know that they have historically been on the receiving end of discrimination. Here, the Dawes Act of 1887 regulated land rights on tribal territories and the United States. It allowed the federal government to break up tribal lands, and land owned by tribal nations fell from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres in 1934. We know that Native American children were forced to learn English in order to quote unquote become more Americanized. We know that Native American families were forced from their homelands and onto reservations. And we know that the United States government had to use force, in many cases, to move some Native Americans. And of course, we know what has happened, you know, recently around the use of the shameful racist mascot. And for years, there were, so there were attempts to have sports teams get rid of this really derogatory image. And of course, we know, with Washington's NFL team, dropping the Redskins name and Indian head logo after having it for 87 years. Now, we cheer that we're very glad, finally, that this happened. But you should also know that the owner, Snyder, Mr. Snyder, had refused to do this. In fact, he said that he would never change the name. It was only because of pressure from sponsors PepsiCo and FedEx and Nike, and after a group of shareholders and investment groups threatened to end their relationship with the team, did Mr. Dan Snyder finally decide that this was not good for the bottom line, and racism in this case is not going to pay. So it wasn't because of some moral epiphany, it was because of economic pressures. Here we see, you know, a sign in California, California White. And these types of signs were really directed toward Asian folks. We see another sign here. These were quite popular at one point in time in our nation's history. And again, for those, you know, who, for some reason may not know, there has been a span of anti-Asian violence that reminds us that we are not talking about something in a bygone era. And here is an exact example of what I'm talking about. He came forward and slashed me from cheek to cheek. He didn't say anything, he just did it. And nobody came, nobody helped me. When I left the train, I thought I wouldn't make it. Noel Quintana's case in New York is just one of almost 4,000 anti-Asian hate incidents reported in the U.S. over the past year. In cities like San Francisco, a large Asian American population hasn't stopped the harassment either. I noticed a young gentleman who wasn't wearing his mask, so I walked a little faster. Once he got with an air shot, I asked him just for the safety of my infants to please wear a mask. At that point, he locked eyes with me and charged us. He decided to walk straight at us. I let out a few choice words and ran into the house screaming for my husband, who came running down the stairs and scared him away. The young man came back at least three times to throw things into our foyer and leave not only a racist note, but a racist mask that he wrote on. You don't want to reveal your identity. Why is that? I can't endanger my young infants. They've already been, before the age of one, subjected to hate crime. I'm not going to give anybody else another chance to do that to them again. I think the outrage that you're seeing from the Asian American community has a lot to do with feeling invisible, having a lot to do with our issues not getting attention and recognition and resources, and it has to do with the model minority myths that really was manufactured to deny structural racism. We had already been seeing a lot of news that there's people getting beat down, robbed in Chinatown, and we were just really, really hurt to see that. You know, we were really hurt and we just thought, you know, we need to start doing something. We need to go out to the community and patrol. Do you see your role as defending Chinatown from these attacks? We see our role as preventing and also as reporting as well. So we do a lot of observing, recording, and reporting. Those are our three main tasks. We don't actually get into physical fights with anybody. This is our weapon right here. It's, hey, excuse me. This is our weapon. But this community doesn't always report crimes, and activists fear that the actual number is far worse. We have members of our community who don't speak English as their primary language, or they're undocumented, or they might have this sense of, you know, what can be done about it. And so there's a deep distrust, and it's for legitimate reasons. And unfortunately, these acts of anti-Asian violence are still continuing. And as I was completing my PhD in 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia, and this was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, a man by the name of James Byrd, an African American man, was murdered by three men, of whom at least two were white supremacists in Jasper, Texas. He was beaten, chained by the ankles to the back of a pickup truck, and dragged for three and a half miles until he was decapitated. So you can imagine the reticence I felt when I had the opportunity to come to Texas and teach at the University of Texas at Austin, because I don't know about you, but I had some images, some thoughts about the state of Texas, and these types of incidents I became aware of. And so again, we're not talking about something that happened 100 years ago. This was less than 25 years ago in this country that people are claiming to not be racist. So anyway, I just wanted to kind of start off with that because it's important, again, particularly within this sort of national dialogue that we're having around critical race theory and systemic racism, and whether this country is or is not racist, it's important that we never forget our history, our past, but also what's occurring today. So I want to transition now and to talk a little bit about this sort of death by police phenomenon that we have heard too much about. And it's really sort of forced America to have yet another reckoning with race. Now we know that race has never been easy to talk about. I don't know about you, but growing up, and I grew up in rural North Carolina, there were certain topics that you never talk about outside of family and maybe close friends. You know, you didn't talk about religion, you didn't talk about politics, you didn't talk about sex, and you didn't talk about race. These were very, very sensitive topics that you only have amongst your family and maybe close friends. So race has never been easy to talk about. But after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, we suddenly sort of have this national movement to fight systemic racism. So we were thrust into being forced to have to talk about race. And the deaths of these individuals, the murders of these individuals, really facilitated that. Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man, just jogging, minding his own business, literally pursued and hunted down and fatally shot in Georgia. Breonna Taylor, we know her story, fatally shot in her apartment when white officers forced entry into their apartment, and she still does not have justice. And of course, we all know what happened with George Floyd and how that started really a worldwide movement. But then after George Floyd's murder, you'll recall that almost a year later, we had the death of 20-year-old Daunte Wright, seen at the bottom here with his son, killed on April 11. And then of course, and this especially is heartbreaking, Adam Toledo, the picture at the top, 13-year-old Adam Toledo, killed on April 15 of this year. And so all at the hands of police. And these and so many more before them, and unfortunately, what we know will likely be those after, will continue to force us to sort of grapple with race and racism in this country. And we know that the start of what we now know or call the Black Lives Matter movement really started with the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman. You'll remember in 2014 when 12-year-old Tamir Rice holding a pellet gun was shot and killed by police in Cleveland. And then the city of Cleveland having the audacity to blame this 12-year-old kid for his own death. Here in Austin, Texas, I was contacted by a lawyer to serve as an expert witness for a case involving a Black teacher who was arrested. And I want to just share with you this clip from the camcorder of the arresting officer so that you could see what she experienced. 24 hours ago, Austin police released a video of an officer slamming a woman to the ground during an arrest. And now we're hearing from Breon King, the woman in that video. Kay, actually, as Leslie Randall sat down today with King as she took us through those tense moments. I was taken aback. Honestly, I was taken aback. Confusion is what Breon King says was going through her mind as she was getting out of her car June 15, 2015. She's standing next to my door. I was in the vehicle. You know, he asked me to get in the vehicle. But I guess my foot was out. And before I had a chance to comply, it escalated. The second grade Austin teacher taken to the ground. I was afraid for my life. I had this man pulling me out of my car and I didn't understand why. It was pure fear. I really wanted God to help me. I needed him to save me. I didn't know what was going to happen. King and the officer struggle. Then she's handcuffed and put in the back of a police car. New video shows a different view of what happened. Oh my God, I don't trust this. The woman clearly traumatized moments after the arrest. He raped my daughter. That's ridiculous. You should not treat people like this. Then an officer begins to calm her down and a conversation about race begins on her way to jail. Let me ask you this. Why are so many people afraid of white people? Yeah, but I want to figure it out. Do you want to get a really good idea of why I'd be that way? I wanted to understand the point of view that the officer was coming from. What is it? Why is it? How can we make a change? That's what I was trying to understand. What is it that I need to do and what do we need to do as a community to make sure that we change these things in a positive way so that it doesn't continue to happen to people? I'm not going to do anything. Coming up tonight at 6, more on our interview with Breon King and why she says it took her so long to come forward with her story. For now, reporting in the newsroom, Leslie Rangel, KXAN News. Player Steve Adler now weighing in, calling that video outrageous, offensive and counter to the values of our community. He also commended Police Chief Arda Acevedo for taking quick action. It should come as no surprise to you that Breon King, as a result of this violent encounter, needed extensive therapy because as you can see here, it was traumatizing for her. I was brought in as an expert witness to talk about the impact of this incident, not just on Breon, certainly I addressed that, but the vicarious impact that Black folks have when we have to see these types of violent incidents over and over and over again. And imagine her students, and her students ended up seeing this video on TV and wondering, Ms. King, why are they doing this to Ms. King and having to explain that to her students? I don't know how many of you are familiar with the show Black-ish. Black-ish is a comedy that has done very well, but they decided to, in this episode, to take on this issue of police brutality. So a show that's normally just full of jokes and comedy, took a moment to be serious to address this issue of police violence. Lamar, you're speaking. It's important in the midst of all the public vilifying of the police department, whose members acted completely within procedure, to remember Mr. McQuillan was no angel. What? Why would they even say that? What does that even mean? I'm talking about somebody's child. That could easily be one of these children here. That could have been one of us. No, sweetie, no, no. Because if you get stopped by the cops, you are going to do exactly what they say, okay? She's right. Listen to me. If you have to talk to the cops, there's only seven words you need to know. Yes, sir. No, sir. And thank you, sir. Exactly. You make sure you live to fight your case in court, you hear me? Bo! Mama! Enough! Wake up! Let's say they listen to the cops and get in the car. Look what happened to Freddie Gray. Yeah, and what if they make it all the way to the station? You remember Sandra Bland? And let's say they do make it to the trial. You see where that gets us? Don't you get it, Bo? The system is rigged against us. Maybe it is, Dre, but I don't want to feel like my kids are living in a world that is so flawed that they can't have any hope. Oh, so you want to talk about hope, Bo? Obama ran on hope. Remember when he got elected and we felt like maybe, just maybe, we got out of that bad place and made it to a good place. That the whole country was really ready to turn the corner. You remember that amazing feeling we had during the inauguration? I was sitting right next to you and we were so proud. And we saw him get out of that limo, walk alongside of it, and wave to that crowd. Tell me you weren't terrified when you saw that. Tell me you weren't worried that someone was going to snatch that hope away from us like they always do. That is the real world, Bo. And our children need to know that that's the world that they live in. That's the world that they live in. So this is the reality. This is the sobering reality that too many Black families have, where they have to have this talk, the talk about racism with their kids. And so I want to just share something very personal. So here, this is my, at the time, 11-year-old son, Asa. And when George Floyd was murdered, it was everywhere in the news. You could not turn on the TV without seeing a reference to George Floyd and his murder. And my wife and I were trying to shield this story from our kids. We have a son and a daughter. And we just did not want to have to sort of have that conversation because it's so deep and so painful. So whenever we were watching, if CNN would be on, if they would come into the room, we would turn the channel. Well, there's something called TikTok. Perhaps you are familiar with it. And my son was watching a TikTok video. And he came to me, and he was like, Dad, I was watching TikTok video. And he saw George Floyd, and he saw the knee in the back of his neck. And he was upset. And he didn't know. He was trying to make sense of this. And so I took a moment to sit down with him to have the talk. And I recorded just a portion of it. And this is just a minute. But I want to, for those who haven't had to have this conversation with your Black son, I just want to sort of share what this moment is like. What would you say is the most upsetting thing about that video? About just the police. It looked like that the police was trying to kill him. And that's what it looked like. I saw him bring his knee back as hard as he could to the neck. I sat down. And the Black guy was helpless. No one even dared to try to do anything. And I can see why people didn't do it. But it would have been better if someone tried to go up to the police and try to push him off of him, you know, just to get him off. But it didn't happen. It still brings tears to my eyes. And I've seen this. And obviously, he was there. But I've witnessed, I've just viewed this so many times. Later, what he says was even more heartbreaking. He said, you know, that if he had been there, that he would have, you know, would have tried to push the police officer off of George Floyd, even if it meant risking being killed himself. I want you to just let those words sink in for a moment. No 11-year-old kid should have to be grappling with such existential questions of life or death. And yet, that was the time, that is the time that we find ourselves in, particularly when we are trying to explain and have these conversations with our kids. And of course, it reminds me, whenever I see this cartoon, I think it's so apt in describing what's going on. So here, you know, we see on the left what appears to be a young white boy. I'm going out, mom. And the mom says, put on your jacket. And then for a young black boy, I'm going out, mom. Put on your jacket. Keep your hands inside at all times. Don't make any sudden moves. Keep your mouth shut around police. Don't run. Don't wear a hoodie. Don't give them an excuse to hurt you, et cetera. We have to have different conversations with our kids because they are going out into a world that views them as dangerous. And that's the reality. We have different lived experiences. And so we know that the history of police brutality against black people, combined with witnessing an act that is perceived to be motivated by prejudice and or anti-black racism, it can result in the same psycho-biological reactions that occur with victims of rape and child abuse. And we also know that through research that police brutality videos hurt black Americans' mental health. And there was a study that was done. Mental health data were collected or examined from each state. And respondents reported how many days of poor mental health they had experienced in the past month based on stress, depression, and emotional problems. And then the researchers obtained information on police killings from the website Mapping Police Violence, which has sort of compiled this data on police killings since 2013. And what the researchers found was that killings cause an additional 1.7 poor mental health days per person every year, or an additional 55 million poor mental health days per year in the general US population. We know that black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans, and five times more likely to be killed while they're unarmed. And on average, black Americans are exposed to four police killings of other unarmed black Americans in the same state each year. And that police killings affected mental health the most within the first two months of the incident. So whenever we see these high profile killings, we should be very concerned about the impact that it's having on black folks, particularly as we know now through sort of studies like this, particularly within the first two months. And I have spoken to colleagues and friends in private practice who have talked about what they have seen in their own sort of practice in terms of the increasing number of black people sort of seeking mental health support and linking it in part to sort of what's going on around us. So we know quite simply that racism is trauma. And according to research, the effects from experiencing racism is similar to what trauma patients suffer. People may develop anxiety. They may think about the hurtful incidents often. Some might say that they may even sort of perseverate. They worry that it will happen again. They feel that they have little power to stop racist remarks or actions. And few things are worse than that feeling of helplessness or powerlessness in the midst of experiencing racism. They sometimes question their own worth. They may feel sad or worry about the future. And of course, they may experience a bout of depression. I wanna share this quick story here, which sort of I think makes the point about just how pervasive and deep racism is. So here we see civil rights attorney, Clyde Murphy, class of 1970, Yale University. After he graduated from Yale, he received a law degree from Columbia, and then he spent the next 30 years as one of America's top civil rights lawyers. And yet he died at the relatively young age of 62. And he died from a pulmonary embolism. Now that in and of itself may not necessarily be that remarkable beyond the fact that he died relatively young, except for the fact that nine of the 32 African-American men who entered Yale in the class of 1970 have also died, which comes out to a rate of more than three times that of the class as a whole. And so, if you're into statistics, you sort of have to sort of ask yourself, is this, what is the probability that this percentage of black men would die disproportionately compared to the rest of their classmates? And the sociologist David Williams has done quite a bit of research where he shows the racial disparities in death rates that happen among black people at every level of income. Because sometimes we think that we are protected by our income, by our education, by our social class, social status. But we need to be clear that that's not necessarily the case. For many black people, an Ivy League education, while it opened up doors of aspiration and ambition, it did not necessarily correspond with doors of opportunity. And the effort, the psychic effort that it takes to win success causes strain and fatigue and dejection. And so Williams found in a paper, 2002 paper, something that is rather ominous, that this pattern of racial disparities in death rates has been observed across multiple health outcomes. And for some indicators of health, the racial gap becomes larger as the socioeconomic status increases. I want you to think about that, this racial gap in disparities of death rates, in some instances becomes larger as our socioeconomic status increases. So we are not protected necessarily by having a higher income, being in a higher tax bracket. If anything, we might be even more susceptible to these negative outcomes. And of course, I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of John Henryism, based on the story of the folk hero, John Henry, an African-American who worked vigorously enough to compete successfully with a steam-powered machine, but died because he worked so hard to beat this steam-powered machine, ended up dying as a result of his efforts. Well, the term John Henryism, of course, has been coined to describe a strategy for coping with prolonged exposure to stresses, such as social discrimination, by expending high levels of effort, which results in accumulating physiological costs. So we work and we work and we bust our tails, trying to prove ourselves in the midst of doubters, racist environments, et cetera, but oftentimes it comes at a cost. And it comes at a, not only a psychological cost, but it comes at a physical health cost. We know that chronic everyday discrimination is associated with a host of negative outcomes, coronary artery calcification, higher blood pressure, et cetera. One University of Georgia study linked racism to greater risk of diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. Racism literally makes us sick. And what is the, you know, what can be the extreme result of this? I present to you activist, Erica Garner. Erica Garner, a prominent social justice activist who spearheaded protests against police brutality has died this morning. Yeah, she had been in a coma after suffering a massive heart attack last week, left her with severe brain damage. She was 27 years old. Erica is the eldest daughter of Eric Garner. Remember, he was killed in 2014 after New York City police officer put him in a chokehold. That's a move that NYPD had banned. Garner was selling loose cigarettes at the time, but his death helped later spark the Black Lives Matter movement. Erica's family just tweeted this from her official account. When you report this, you remember she was human. Mother, daughter, sister, aunt. Her heart was bigger than the world. It really, really was. She cared when most people wouldn't have. She was good. She only pursued right, no matter what, and no one gave her justice. And thoughts and prayers go on to her family today. All right, so I know that I am running behind time, so I gotta get through these other slides very quickly, so forgive me. Erica, go ahead. So, you know, we know that perceived discrimination has been linked to all sorts of negative mental health outcomes. We know that African-Americans report the highest level of discrimination of all ethnic groups and tend to appraise discrimination as more stressful than most ethnic groups. That perceived discrimination can lead to long-term substance abuse problems. Individuals who perceive themselves to be victims of racial discrimination are also more likely to smoke. We know that one study found that African-Americans who experience stress from racial discrimination are more likely to experience depression and lash out in violence. We call this externalizing behavior. Another study found that 18% of African-Americans who perceive discrimination reported higher levels of emotional or health-related problems. And so the psychologist Janet Helms basically said that racism and what she calls ethno-violence, this is missing from the traditional trauma literature. When you read the trauma literature, you don't oftentimes see references to racism as trauma, but in fact, racism should be seen as trauma, and the trauma literature should recognize it as such. Here's a picture showing families separated at the border. As of April 7th, 2021, which is when I found these pictures, parents of 445 children still had not been found. When my son saw this picture, he didn't know what was going on and when I explained to him how children were being taken away from their parents, he started to cry because he could not understand why something like this, how something like this could happen in this country. And so as I sort of wind down here, what are the strategies for coping with racism? Well, we know that there are both sort of maladaptive and adaptive strategies. Maladaptive strategies include just sort of being in denial, just not wanting to acknowledge, and I'm gonna go out and live here and say that people who say that racism is not a problem or is not really a serious issue, I am gonna say that that's being in denial because clearly, at least in my mind, that's not the case. Engaging in substance use. We know that some people self-medicate. Acting out in terms of being forms of aggression, engaging in self-blame. And unfortunately, in some extreme cases, they could commit suicide. We know that Black Lives Matter activist, Marshawn McCarroll committed suicide or in another really unfortunate case of terrorism, Micah Xavier Johnson ended up shooting and killing several Dallas police officers. So all of these are sort of maladaptive forms of coping. Adaptive forms of coping includes seeking social support within your community, limiting our exposure to cues of racism. Sometimes we just have to sort of sign off on social media. We need to turn that TV off. And I am one who is really bad about just sort of sitting and just in front of the TV for just hours, it seems like, just watching what seems like an incessant negative news cycle. Sometimes we just need to just sort of say, you know what, we can't continue to sort of expose ourselves to this negativity. So signing off social media, limiting our TV watching. For those of you who identify yourselves as sort of religious or spiritual, utilizing religious or spiritual practices for comfort, seeking distraction from cues of racism, for example, engaging in pleasurable activities, participating in restful and relaxing activities we know is always important and engaging in peaceful activism. Activism, I think it's healthy. It's healthy for our democracy. I don't advocate burning of stores and looting, but engaging in peaceful activism is an adaptive form of coping. And then finally, last slide, strategies to promote social justice. What can we do for those of us who want to engage in a meaningful way? Advocate, you can advocate for your local law enforcement to employ de-escalation training. You can advocate for the end of unfair policies such as family separation. Work with activists and like-minded people to fight racism. Support minority-owned businesses. A lot of people found themselves watching documentaries and films with colleagues and friends to educate themselves. So for example, Netflix's Immigration Nation or watching 13th are two excellent places to start. Starting a book club and reading books such as Michelle Alexander's A New Jim Crow or Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist or Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility are all excellent books to start off with. Listen, when people of color tell you about their experiences of racism, listen without ego and defensiveness, truly listen. And then finally, don't be. Don't be silent about racism and all forms of oppression. When we saw all of those, when we saw the protests, you saw some signs that said white silence is violence. And what they were simply trying to communicate is that your silence, even if you might not be explicitly engaged in acts of racism, your silence is a tacit form of support. So don't be silent. All right, I think I have, I made it. I think I have finished. So I will stop sharing now. Let's see. I can't see anyone, unfortunately, but you should be able to see me and thank you. Dr. Coakley, I am overwhelmed, frankly, and I want to thank you for this engaging hour. We're looking to see if there's any questions and until we see if there are, I wanted to make one comment and then ask a couple of questions myself. The first comment I want to make, man, is probably out of line, but I want to tell you how much I admire you as a parent. When I saw the things that you built into this conversation around your children, and you talked about your son crying and your son being willing to take a stand, it told me something about who you are and who your wife, who you are as parents. And it's something that I hope, as scary as it is, it's something that I hope you're very, very proud of because you're raising a generation that has to understand what's going on and it's not in denial. Thank you. I also wanted to comment on quickly the point that you made in terms of aspiration and ambition versus opportunity because I think that's often what people go to graduate school, go to medical school, maybe first in their family to have done so, are ambitious and have such great aspirations, but then they run into, and I know that is certainly true in medical school and in the formal organizations that reflect medicine, the doors of opportunity are closed. They may not be locked, but they're certainly closed. Can you just talk for a moment about that cognitive dissonance between opportunity and aspiration and how you look at that? The cognitive dissonance between opportunity and aspiration. I just want, you went out a little bit on me, Dr. Woods. Could you just say a little bit more about the question before I comment? Sure. The opportunity of the aspiration and ambition that fills these young professionals and the pain it must cause when they don't realize the opportunity, they don't have the opportunity, that perhaps the aspiration and ambition should reflect? Well, I mean, we know that there are a number of structural factors that impede people from the opportunities that should be rightfully theirs and that in spite of their talent, their intelligence, their brilliance, their hard work, they may never be able to have that opportunity. And for a number of reasons, completely outside of their control. And so that, I mean, to me, part of what that sort of reveals is elements of systemic racism. I mean, I won't attribute it all to systemic racism, but we can't deny how systemic racism negatively impacts people's opportunities and resist barriers for success. This is sort of tangential to your question, but I'll sort of tag it on because it's related to an area of my research. And that is sort of feelings of imposterism. So feelings of imposterism are particularly prevalent amongst black folks, bipartisan people and women. And of course, imposter feelings are feelings of intellectual fraudulence that you see amongst people who are very talented, successful, who are very intelligent, who nevertheless feel like they are fooling people, who feel like that they haven't truly earned or deserve the status that they have achieved. And one of the things that we know, and I know through my own research, is that these feelings of imposterism are especially salient amongst black folks. And you see it particularly in settings like medical school. I have a graduate student who is completing her dissertation and she collected data across multiple racial and ethnic groups on imposterism and she was able to document how imposterism feelings were especially salient and prevalent amongst black folks. And I'm sure many of you could probably share stories about being in situations where people looked at you and questioned your presence in the medical profession. Why are you here? Or maybe make some disparaging comment that you're only there because of affirmative action or something along those lines. And so those are the sorts of things that if you are even fortunate enough to be able to sort of make it into the medical profession, that you sort of had to contend with. And so I know that wasn't exactly what you asked me, but I really wanted to make sure that I added that. No, no, it was because I think that this series is really about the structural racism that we see within our profession and within the organization, within the American Psychiatric Association itself. And I think it's important that we address that structural racism before we can address the individual racism because the structural racism appears to be without intent. And that's what makes it most frightening. And one more question that speaks to that, and that is following up on the imposter syndrome, the anti-intellectual quality, which again is so often found. Can you talk a bit about your research on anti-intellectualism? Yeah, certainly. So I wrote this book on the myth of anti-intellectualism and I wrote it because of a book that was written, I think around 2000 by an individual named John McWhorter. He wrote a book called "'Losing the Race, Self-Sabotaging Black America." And he's an African-American linguistic scholar. And he wrote this book to sort of make the claim that the reason that black students and black folks were underachieving and not doing as well in society was not because of racism. He said that he claimed that it was because of what he called this ethos, this cultural ethos of sort of anti-intellectualism. And I remember when he wrote that book and it made a splash and he was sort of put on TV and he got all these sort of media spots because he was a black man basically sort of making an argument that some white folks sort of believe but were afraid to make publicly for fear of being labeled a racist. So he got a lot of notoriety because of that. But for those of us who did research on issues of black student achievement, when we sort of read his book, we were disturbed because it was such a problematic book that was not rooted in any sort of really strong psychological educational research. And so I wrote this book to really sort of challenge the notion that black students sort of don't value school, don't buy education. And I did it through a combination of sort of, citing research, my own included, as well as sort of presenting it within a sort of historical context. This notion that black people don't buy education is really an ahistorical sort of statement. Black folks, we have always valued education and we have fought to get quality education. But the problem is that so many black kids end up getting turned off by education because of the nature of their educational experiences. It's not that there's some intrinsic cultural sort of antagonism towards education, it's because of what they are experiencing in classrooms from teachers who have already predetermined that they are not capable or that they are sort of less than and then sort of enact this in various sort of practices. And so I really wanted to disrupt that notion, present sort of data to challenge that notion and to say, look, if we want to ensure that black students are maximizing and living up to their capabilities, we have got to do things differently in the classroom, we've got to give them an education that speaks to their sort of experiences that helps them see themselves in the curriculum, among other things. And I got that from the person who mentored me for many years, Dr. Asa Hillier. And so in a nutshell, that's really what I attempted to do in that book. Asa Hillier was a close friend of mine. So I know our time is up. I wanna thank you for your brilliance, your thoughtfulness and your humanity. And I look forward to learning more from you. Learning more from you. And this is the end of our first presentation. I hope you enjoyed it. I haven't seen any questions come up, but we're about 11 minutes over. So I think we should probably stop at this time. Dr. Coakley, a real pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

psychological impact of racism

history of racism

racial terrorism

police brutality

racism as trauma

mental health challenges

perceived discrimination

well-being

depression

marginalized individuals

social justice