For suicidal young blacks, parental rejection and abuse are compounded by rejection from society and by the realization that discrimination limits their opportunities for advancement. “It does not seem surprising that suicide becomes a problem at such a relatively early age for the black person,” Hendin wrote. “A sense of despair, a feeling that life will never be satisfying, confronts many blacks at a far younger age than it does most whites. For most discontented white people the young years contain the hope of a significant change for the better. The marked rise in white suicide after forty-five reflects, among other things, the decline in such hope that is bound to accompany age.” If, as suicidologists say, hopelessness is a central ingredient of the suicidal equation, many young African-Americans are at perpetually high risk. A black man who hanged himself in a juvenile detention center left this note: “I haven’t got nothing. And I ain’t never going to be nobody. Tell my mother good-bye, if you can find her.”
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all of the time,” wrote James Baldwin. Statistics can only hint at the sources and consequences of that rage. Adolescents lacking a parent are more likely to attempt suicide; today 68 percent of black children are born to single mothers, more than half of all black children have no father at home, and divorce among blacks is twice as frequent as among whites. Unemployment, as Brenner pointed out, is correlated with suicide; for much of the eighties and early nineties, joblessness among black men hovered around 30 percent, nearly three times higher than among white men; for black teens the rate exceeded 40 percent. Although the boom of the 1990s brought black unemployment down, it is still twice the white rate. In 2002, boom over, one-third of black families were in debt or had no assets, three times the rate of white families. High school dropouts are at higher risk for suicide; some 18 percent of black males drop out of high school. Rates of suicide among the incarcerated are shockingly high; one in three African-American males will be behind bars at some point in their lives. Given that blacks also suffer from poor housing, disproportionately poor education, and poor access to quality health care, it is remarkable that the black youth suicide rate is not far higher.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that many young urban blacks treat violence, including murder, with nonchalance. “They believe they have nothing to lose,” social worker James Evans Jr. told Time magazine. “Even if they should lose their own lives, they feel as if they will not have lost very much.” Homicide or suicide may seem the only way of making a dent in a world that is repressive, contemptuous, or, at best, indifferent to their presence. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison described violence as a way for blacks to reassure themselves of their existence: “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish.” Social worker Ruth Dennis, who has studied black suicide and homicide for several decades, points out that such violence has become an accepted cultural tradition for young urban blacks. “His group may demand that he prove his manhood by not ‘backing down’ from a life-threatening encounter even if it means his own destruction,” she told the audience at a National Symposium on Black Suicide. “This behavior is demanded by the only group that accepts him.” Dennis compared it to the behavior of eighteenth-century European gentlemen who felt obliged to challenge someone to a duel at the slightest insult.
Social scientists suggest that some young urban blacks express a combination of suicidal and homicidal impulses by provoking someone else into killing them. They may consider it a more acceptable form of death than suicide per se, which is perceived as unmanly. And so they engage, kamikazelike, in shootouts with police against overwhelming odds, often triggering their own death. One young black man, for instance, brandished a pistol he knew to be unloaded at policemen and was shot. It has been suggested that 10 percent of fatal shootings by police in this country may, in fact, be cases of what has been called “suicide by cop.” In one of the few studies of the subject, researchers analyzed 437 shootings by police officers in the greater Los Angeles area and determined that, although they had been recorded as homicides, 46 fit the description of what, in a cumbersome but descriptively precise phrase, they dubbed “law-enforcement-forced assisted suicide.” Twenty-nine percent of the victims had histories of psychiatric treatment; 65 percent had talked of suicide to family or friends; 100 percent had brandished a weapon and shown evidence that they wanted the police officers to shoot them. A few psychologists have suggested that radical groups like the Black Panthers, one of whose slogans was Revolutionary Suicide, have deliberately courted death at the hands of authorities, or that rioting by African-Americans following incidents of police brutality is a form of collective self-destruction, given that most of the damage is usually suffered by black-owned property. “The problem with such speculations is that they often arise out of unconscious and sometimes conscious attempts to blame the victim for the brutal acts of another,” writes psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “According to this rationalization, violence among blacks is suicidal behavior, a black who resists a white policeman is trying to commit suicide: so the policeman who murders is morally absolved of homicide. Such assumptions imply that blacks who rise up and rebel against an unjust system are crazy rather than courageous, insane rather than incensed. Many institutional authorities refuse to acknowledge the willingness of black youth to risk their lives because they want a better life.”
In Lay My Burden Down: Understanding Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, Poussaint and coauthor Amy Alexander suggest that suicidal blacks of all ages may suffer from what they call posttraumatic slavery syndrome, a state of low self-esteem and internalized racism inculcated by a system that, long after the end of legal segregation, continues to discriminate against them. They say that many black suicides are what Durkheim called fatalistic. “There is a type of suicide the opposite of anomic suicide,” wrote Durkheim. “. . . It is the suicide deriving from excessive regulation, that of persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline.” Durkheim believed that fatalistic suicide was rare, relegating it to a footnote in Le Suicide and citing as an example the suicides of very young (and presumably beleaguered) husbands. Nevertheless, he wrote, “Do not the suicides of slaves . . . belong to this type, or all suicides attributable to excessive physical or moral despotism?”
Durkheim’s theory was supported by Warren Breed’s 1970 study of suicide in New Orleans. He found that more than half of suicides by blacks occurred in the context of conflict with authorities—landlords, lawyers, tax officials, and police—compared with only 10 percent of white suicides. Many had a great (and perhaps justified) terror of the police, like the young man who had always expressed such a fear although he had never been arrested. One night, during an argument, he shot and wounded his girlfriend; when he heard police sirens, he turned the gun on himself. In many cases blacks completed suicide in the face of problems that could easily have been resolved had they had some basic knowledge of community resources—legal aid services, housing authorities, tax agencies, and so on. “The Negro is subject to the imperatives of two communities,” wrote Breed, “and when his difficulties extend outside of the Negro sphere, he is faced with authorities who are white—to him an alien force. He bears a double burden of social regulation. A white man can feel trapped, too, but the data demonstrate a much lower frequency of the ‘authority’ stress factor in white male suicide.”
With so much against them, why have blacks had such a low rate of suicide? Ironically, their very history of struggle against discrimination may play an important role, by forcing them to cultivate an inner strength that offers protection against self-destruction. “Their expectations of life have been different from those of whites,” says Alvin Poussaint. “Thus, tragedy that might drive a white man to self-murder might be accepted by a black man as one more incident in a life
of hard times.” (“Black Poets should live—not leap / From steel bridges, like the white boys do. / Black Poets should live—not lay / their necks on railroad tracks, like the white boys do,” as poet Etheridge Knight puts it in “For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide.”) This may help explain the astonishingly low rate of elderly black suicide. In 2000, the rate for black males over sixty-five was 12 per 100,000—three times lower than that of their white counterparts. The rate for elderly black women has hovered around 2 per 100,000 for many decades—perhaps the lowest rate of any demographic group in this country. Elderly blacks, it is theorized, have made a certain peace with their lives in a racist society, scaling down their hopes to fit reality more closely. (One psychologist offers a more practical explanation, suggesting that the majority of violent black males are removed from the population before they reach old age, having killed themselves, been murdered, or been imprisoned.) In the face of adversity, blacks have developed a strong network of family, religious, and community ties—ties that, as Durkheim pointed out, offer protection against suicide. In a study of marital status and suicide, Steven Stack found that while the divorce or death of a spouse raised the risk of suicide significantly among African-Americans, as it does among whites, being single did not. The association between marital status and suicide was less operative for blacks than for whites, which the author suggested was attributable to traditionally stronger family ties. The extraordinarily low rate among elderly black women may further be encouraged by the matriarchal tradition in African-American families. Black grandmothers play an important role in family life (caring for children, cooking, keeping house), which may give them a sense of purpose that many elderly whites say they lack. Older blacks are also bolstered by their strong sense of spirituality and their immersion in religious traditions with powerful taboos against suicide.
If the bonds forged during segregation offered African-Americans some protection against suicide, what effect has integration had? In 1938, psychoanalyst Charles Prudhomme predicted that as blacks in America entered the white-dominated mainstream, their suicide rate would approach the white rate (just as the rates of immigrants grow more similar over time to those of the majority population and less similar to those in their countries of origin). The black suicide rate has indeed risen since 1938—although no faster than the white rate. Prudhomme’s theory was lent credence by a 1965 study that found that while Harlem’s suicide rate was half that of New York City as a whole, there were three middle-class Harlem communities in which the suicide rates equaled those of the entire city. Ruth Dennis has suggested there may be two forms of black suicide: the angry urban suicide Hendin described and the suicide of those trying to assimilate, to succeed in a world dominated by whites. Success in the white-dominated world may be a double-edged sword. As blacks move, geographically and socioeconomically, they are less likely to be part of tight-knit communities; indeed, over the past several decades, the involvement of blacks, especially young males, in social and religious organizations, has declined. A 1998 study traced the rise in African-American suicide—of youth suicide in particular—to a decline in religious beliefs and practices. (Given that in-migration has historically led to a rise in the suicide rate, the massive twentieth-century flow of black Americans from the South to the North, from rural to urban areas, where they were exposed to unfamiliar stresses, may in some measure be responsible for the rising rate. Rates are higher for blacks in the North; in the South they have remained traditionally low.) Just as women’s suicide rates grew as they entered the mainstream of society, so, too, have black rates risen as their status—and their expectations—has risen. Durkheim was the first to observe that poverty may protect people from suicide because those who expect little are not disappointed when they receive little. Psychologist Richard Seiden writes, “Perhaps these unifying social ties are destroyed as personal aspirations are realized. Could increased suicide be the ticket of admission to the middle-class American dream?” This view was supported by a study by Alton Kirk, a psychologist at Michigan State, who found that blacks who attempted suicide had less racial pride and less sense of black identity than blacks who did not attempt suicide. Kirk believes that black consciousness, in giving one a more positive self-concept, offers a protective shield against suicide. Those who “try to become more assimilated into the contemporary white American society,” he says, will “find themselves in ‘the ethnic twilight zone,’ belonging to neither the white or the black world.”
While the rate has risen, it remains comparatively low. The low rate is especially surprising given African-Americans’ consistent underutilization of mental health services. Part of the reason is financial: only about 25 percent have health insurance. Part is historical: often denied medical care or offered substandard treatment in segregated facilities or poorly funded and understaffed hospitals, blacks may have an understandable skepticism of the medical community in general and of mental health professionals in particular. Part may be cultural: in a 2000 National Mental Health Association survey, two-thirds of blacks considered depression to be a “personal weakness” treatable by prayer and faith; only a third recognized it as an illness for which they’d take a prescribed medication—nearly the reverse of the figures for the general population. Many African-Americans describe depression as “the blues” or “being down” and may think of it as an almost inevitable part of life—something to suffer through, not something to see a therapist about. “The internal strength which allowed blacks to endure centuries of hardships has, it seems to us, morphed over the decades into a form of stoicism that provides little room for acknowledging and addressing mental health problems,” write Poussaint and Alexander. (Poussaint, whose brother died of a heroin overdose, and Alexander, whose brother jumped to his death, cowrote Lay My Burden Down in part to break the silence about depression and suicide in the African-American community.) The shame associated with mental illness was poignantly expressed in a suicide note, quoted in Lay My Burden Down, left by a twenty-three-year-old black man who shot himself to death: “Mom, don’t tell anybody I killed myself. Just tell them somebody killed me because I don’t want people to think I’m crazy.”
To those clinicians who increasingly tout the link between mental illness and suicide—and promote psychopharmacology as a panacea—the low rate of African-American suicide is baffling. (One can’t help playing devil’s advocate: Might blacks actually have a higher rate if they turned more to medication and mental health professionals? Might whites have a lower rate if they spent less time with pill-dispensing physicians and more with family, church, and community?) Certainly the paradox offers intriguing territory for exploration. Things have changed since I attended the 1985 NIMH Youth Suicide Conference and was surprised to find that of the more than four hundred attendees, only sixteen showed up for the presentation on black youth suicide. Yet there remain relatively few rigorous studies of African-American suicide. (For several years, in fact, the American Association of Suicidology was unable to award its annual prize for research on minority suicide.) Although an increasing number of prevention centers train volunteers, most of whom are white, in how to deal with callers whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds differ from their own, few people could argue with Alton Kirk’s observation that “Blacks view suicide among blacks as a rare occurrence; whites see black suicide as a black problem. Too many people, black and white, fail to see that black suicide is symptomatic of more general societal problems—societal problems which we must work together to solve before they destroy us all, both black and white.”
One of the reasons that sophisticated research on black suicide has been scarce is that until 1964, the National Center for Health Statistics lumped all “nonwhites” into a single statistical category. At that point, the office began subdividing this group into blacks and “all others,” which still left Native Americans, Asians, and dozens of other groups in one category. Until 1997, Hispanic-Americans were buried within the “white” statistical category, ens
uring that research on Hispanic-American suicide would be virtually nonexistent. One of the few large-scale studies surveyed the five Southwestern states (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas) where the majority of all Hispanics in America live and where, since 1975, death certificates have distinguished between Anglos and Hispanics. The study showed that the suicide rate of Hispanics (9.0) was less than the national rate for whites and one-half that of Anglos living in that area. This was true for both males and females. Almost 70 percent of Hispanics who completed suicide were under age forty, and 33 percent were under twenty-five (compared with only 17 percent of Anglos). For women the rate peaked early, then fell off sharply; for men the rates were highest in the twenties and after age sixty but still much lower than for Anglos. (It must be remembered, however, that this study was primarily of Mexican-Americans and did not reflect cultural differences among various Hispanic groups.) In 2002, the rate among Hispanics (which includes persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central and South American origins) was 5.0, slightly less than half the overall national rate. As with black suicide, the Hispanic rate peaks in youth. Hispanic high school students are nearly twice as likely as their white or black classmates to say they have attempted suicide.
Research on Native American suicide is similarly sparse, a fact underscored during a six-week period in 1985 when nine young Native Americans (eight Arapaho and one Shoshone) killed themselves on the Wind River reservation in Wyoming. All were young men, and all chose hanging—using rope, socks, bailing twine, sweatpants, and the drawstring from a sweatshirt. Over the following months, psychologists and counselors held weekly suicide prevention sessions in the reservation schools, discussing clues, warning signs, alcohol abuse, and so on. A task force delivered family counseling. A teen suicide hotline was established. But there was another, less clinically orthodox response. The community’s young Arapaho took part in a tribal rite last performed in 1918 to ward off an outbreak of Spanish influenza. Four feathers, each decorated with a red ribbon and blessed with the Arapaho sacred pipe, were placed near the tribal sun-dance ground to mark the points of the compass and purge the unhappiness that might have caused the suicides. Inside a tepee, an elder cleansed members of the tribe by tapping on the ground, painting their faces with scarlet paint, and having them step over a burning herb. Hundreds of young people waited their turn outside. There would not be another suicide for almost six months.
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