“Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime” - How to Be an Antiracist 

- Ibram X. Kendi (p.8)

In the mental health world, I have always actualized the above concept and attempted corrections, with the assumption that the most prevalent internalized stigma in my life was coming from myself. I must accept my mental illness. I must accept daily medications and pursue a program of healing and recovery actively. I must do this in order to take responsibility for my illness. And within this journey, learning to reorder my beliefs to understanding my illness as a Gift and not a curse, and blogging and sharing my writing on this journey, in the hopes to open the eyes of others and heal myself; this is how I battle the paralyzing stigma of having mental illness.

We all know that there are many layers of discrimination. The search to understand racism, to actively remove and change racist policies, and understanding racism as a system structure and policy that was put in place to defend the abuse and enslavement of specifically Black peoples, and thus the movement to raise awareness about racism and change the laws and policies that define everything about today’s American society that are STILL founded and run by these beliefs and these policies, is gaining popularity. I did not know, as a child of the eighties and nineties, that we had pedaled backwards with Regan’s War on Drugs, increasing incarceration, while racist policy abounded. This institutionalized racist belief system, meant that the crack down was on Black people. All while I was being raised in a liberal Seattle embracing holey jeans, terrible music, and gay visibility, this shit was going down.

I have a white privileged base. I come from blue collar blood: coal mining Welsh from the mines of Wales to the Appalachians, bootlegging Hungarians from Romania, Ford factory assembly working and bread truck-driving English/German folk, and my poor-born French Canadian grandfather that made the officer’s club in the Airforce. But there was alcoholism, mental illness, and abuse. There are stories of homes without plumbing, and homes that sustained themselves by selling produce from the garden. Still, I do not deny my white priveledge. Somehow, my mom was able to make flight attendant with United Airlines (surely her whiteness had a great deal to do with this) in 1967, and my father was elevated in positions of sales and eventually was able to start his own real estate company (surely his whiteness and maleness had to do with this success as well). My parents were baby boomers to the T. Buying, selling, and fixing up properties, while not being afraid to work themselves to the bone with their blue-collar memory, and by the time I came along in 1979, “we” had accumulated wealth and success [in a racist system society]. 

But, the alcoholic and mental illness genes were my eventual landmine. Black is the big picture. Anything that affects women, mentally ill, gays etc., is magnified if you are Black. Enslavement, abuse, murder, rape, indenturement, and neglect, existed and still exists creating  victims of racist beliefs that were played off as science, only working to spread the disease that continues to cause this suffering… for 600 years and counting. Revenge would look like starting a scientific movement that did the reverse to white people. We start at the top, kidnapping Bezos and Zuckerberg, and eventually working down to my family, while rewriting science to “prove” that white people are inferior, and then take away all rights of white people for the next 15 generations. In the end, which still would not be the end, white people would be incarcerated, have multiple generations of handed down internalized trauma, and all would live with the world not seeing them as people, but as other. In theory, there would be no citizenship for white people. All sense of tribal and family history would be stollen, and smashed. If you were born into this world, what do you think it would feel like? How would YOU proceed?

I also have a “story”. I grew up with mental illness, developed addiction to cope with it, and suppressed my gender identity into my forties because my conditioning to be a girl and a woman also came from this system of white maleness that not only oppresses Black people, but other races, women, children, gays, and the physically and sensory disabled. The world that was built to enslave and profit on Black lives, also oppresses all the other categories of people. As early as the 1680’s, the first antiracist/abolitionist movement in Colonial America, was started by the Mennonite people in Pennsylvania, because they could see that a hierarchical system that oppresses “one” race, will always oppress others for whatever reason. These puritan people recognized this, because they had escaped persecution in Europe. But greed crushed hope in the end, as a certain caste of Quakers quashed this movement, in favor of profits that resulted from owning black slaves. Here, the knock down, the “get in your place, boy”, came from the Mennonite neighbor and counterpart. Black on Black abuse from internalized racism is this way. Female shaping and culling goes from mother to daughter, sister to sister, and today, stigma against the mentally ill, comes down hardest within the mental health community. Therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, case managers, and social workers are often the first to introduce a mental patient to the isolating feeling of being stigmatized. Mental health advocates might recoil and chagrin as a schizoaffective introduces themselves confidently, sharing their diagnosis openly, and extending their hand. Alcoholics and Addicts, even those who are admitting their addiction, avoid the label of mental illness at all costs. As a result, many of these folks, live in the revolving doors of rehab centers and they continuously relapse. To admit they have mental health issues, that they need medication, and that this very well may be the cause of their addiction, is still an unheard of taboo in some circles, and is also enforced by our faulty system.

It can feel easier to reach out to and educate people that appear “very different” than us. Changing policy goes beyond raising awareness. Blacks, minorities, immigrants, mentally ill, addicts, gay/gendered, and disabled alike benefit by changing a system that tends to leave us in the dark, and also walking through the revolving door of a life where we are not seen as “real citizens”. It might surprise you how your own internalized stigma/racism/sexism/homophobia is keeping you, and your friends, down. When confronted by this “un-woke” neighbor, we can ask “why are you putting me down?” As I see it, the first step is to own our disadvantaged identities. We must have the courage to stand in-front of a person that does not recognize us as an equal, tell them who we are, stand in confidence, and make them swallow it. Let’s show them we matter in all of the “tiny” battles that we live with day to day. Don’t get me wrong, there is a system to disassemble, but we also can lift up ourselves and those around us in confidence, in sense of self, identity, pride, and courage, by make-believing; and by this I mean making them believe.