Beyond physical wounds, healing Black male trauma

By John Rich, Opinion Contributor, USA Today

Behind the anger of a negative police encounter is often racial trauma. As a doctor, I've learned how important it is to heal that.

Photo by Leslie Barbaro

As a primary care doctor in Boston in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I saw many young Black men who were injured by violence. But one young man stands out in my mind.

The first time I saw him, he was lying in a hospital bed sweating and writhing in pain. Like many young men I saw as a doctor in an urban medical center, and despite what I – and many of my colleagues – might have assumed, this young man had done nothing to provoke the attack. Rather, he was shot simply for his refusal to relinquish the gold chain that hung around his neck. My surgical colleagues had repaired his physical wound in the operating room and were struggling to control the painful aftermath of the injury and the medical treatment.

But it wasn't long after his pain calmed down that this young man told me the story of the police officer who stood over him as he lay on the ground bleeding. The officer chided him with the words, "Don't do nothing stupid like die." This left him angry and disgusted. And I sensed that this brutal disregard for his humanity, as he was lying on the ground fearing he would die, left him with an even deeper wound that he couldn't name.

That unnamed wound is what I have come to understand as racial trauma.

Over the years since, I have heard from numerous young Black male survivors of violence who, regardless of the circumstances that led to their injuries, were traumatized further when they were confronted by police as they lay on the ground bleeding and told, "You're going to die. You're not going to make it. Tell us who did it!"

It was their stories that helped me begin to examine my own presumptions, even as a Black man socialized and indoctrinated into the culture of medicine. I begin to understand, after interviewing many young survivors of violence, how experiences of racial trauma in the lives of these young men fed the cycle of violence. As I wrote about it in "Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men," when young people see the police not as protectors but as victimizers, then in the face of danger, they seek other ways to protect themselves.

So great has this mistrust of the police grown that across the country, fewer and fewer young Black people trust the police enough to cooperate with them even after life-threatening injury.

Sadly, this is not the only racial trauma these young people face in their lives. Even when they enter the medical system, they are often viewed with suspicion and judgment by health care providers who may hold the implicit assumption that "they didn't just get shot, they got themselves shot.” This tendency to literally “blame the victim” when he is a Black man undermines their collective trust in the health care system, which in turn further erodes the health of the entire community.

Over the past 12 years, the goal of my work at Drexel University's Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice has been to change the narrative about young people who survive violence. I founded the center to do just that. 

This is a shift that challenges the racist approach that labels Black men and boys as responsible for any trauma or any ill that comes their way. Our mission is deeply rooted in a public health approach to violence and trauma that serves the needs of survivors and then mobilizes their voices for change.

Starting with Healing Hurt People, a hospital-based trauma intervention founded by my colleague Dr. Ted Corbin, we focus on helping young survivors of injury heal from their physical and emotional wounds. The program has proved that young people of all races can heal from trauma when they have support to address concrete needs in their lives, while also receiving trauma-informed emotional support to heal the trauma that threatens to derail them.

For the past five years, we have been training young people who have experienced violence and trauma to become community health workers and peer specialists. In these roles, they are able to counsel, support and navigate young survivors through the process of healing not only their physical wounds but also the deep emotional wounds of racial trauma.

In recent days, as a country, we have begun to acknowledge and talk about racist violence in the aftermath of the deaths of multiple Black people, including but not limited to Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. We must continue to confront deadly violence at the hands of those who are supposed to protect us.

But beyond that, we must confront the racism that young victims of nonfatal violence experience at the hands of law enforcement and even in the hands of medical care.

The racism that pierces their lives is not limited to one system, but it lies beneath the surface of multiple systems like health care, education, employment and law enforcement. When young survivors of violence can heal from their trauma and grow in their understanding of racial trauma, they will also be empowered to challenge the structural racism in the systems that they encounter.

They are our most vital allies in this struggle.

We must not fail them.

Dr. John Rich is a professor of health management and policy, and co-director for the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.