America Is Making Us Mental
As most of you know, five (5) Dallas police officers lost their lives last Thursday night while serving to protect citizens during a #BlackLivesMatter protest march. As I listen to the different news outlets, I notice words like “sick” and “unstable” being continuously circulated. My family and many black people, like myself, are heartbroken by the tragedy. However, and unfortunately, some black people (UNLIKE myself) are not so sympathetic. Their thirst for retribution is skewed and that is a scary reality... These mindsets and actions are INEXCUSABLE, but I have a theory that might help shed some light on why these things are happening and will hopefully lead us towards solutions.
My theory is that after 400 years of oppression and inequality, the African-American community is starting to suffer from a condition referred to as Reactive Attachment Disorder.
Reactive Attachment Disorder, according to mayoclinic.org, is a serious condition that occurs when an infant or young child’s basic need for comfort, affection, and nurturing aren’t met. As a result of parental negligence, the child develops either extreme indifference to emotional stimulation or extreme irritability (also look-up infant touch deprivation). There are documented studies of children with this disability being given up for adoption due to threatening the lives of their own parents in order to acquire attention. For hundreds of years, America’s institutions and laws (legal and illegal) have treated its black citizenry like a crying baby. There exists this mentality that “if we just let them keep crying, they’ll eventually stop.” I believe that’s exactly what has happened to the African-American community. Every time a horrific tragedy takes place and black people start to protest, they let us have our little marches and riots, confident that when the news cameras eventually leave, we’ll be forced to “stop crying”. And that is how the story always seems to go. But eventually, that crying baby grows up and what is often created is a monster. Once that child has grown up enough to realize that crying will not get them the attention they desired or needed, they look to the only other thing they KNOW will get a reaction- violence. America! The black community is all grown up now. MOST of us (including many of our forefathers) had enough God intervention during these periods of negligence to keep our hearts from becoming hardened, but some of us weren’t so fortunate.
The treatment for Reactive Attachment Disorder consists of repairing the child-parent relationship through acknowledgement and care, as well as everyday interaction with the child, monitored by a caregiver. America, the black community is your neglected child and the only way we can heal is with your love and care. Not by your questioning of “why are you sometimes violent?”. Not by your diminishing of our validated emotions. Not by your telling us to change without offering substantive help. Not by your trying to deflect your own role in our disorder back onto us. And we certainly won’t heal by you saying “I know you are the child with the disorder but I can’t give you extra attention because ALL of my children are important!’ Violence is never the answer and I discourage it with every ounce of my being BUT… I believe that it will take extensive treatment for the violence to stop now. Because black people, my people; we are that child who has cried and cried and yet received no real love or affection. Now that we’re all grown up, many of us don’t know what else to do to make America see us. Stop telling us to stop critiquing your systems when we’ve experienced first-hand, its flaws. If you REALLY care about all lives… actually scratch that, if you are one of those “I haven’t posted a single thing about Black Lives Matter but now things have gotten out of hand because 5 officers were killed so #BlueLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter” people, here’s a tip (and I really want you to take this one in): If you want to save blue lives, swallow your pride and acknowledge black lives. Because sadly, there are people in the black community that are at their wits end, and they’re not going to stop being violent until they get the treatment they have long asked for and deserve.