· FRANÇAIS I don’t really know what “sorority” stands for, or even if it is a term I can identify with. If sorority is to be compared to the solidarity among all women from a universal…
THE EXTERNALISED VISION: THE EXTERNALISED VISION:
IF THERE IS NO ME,
MENTAL HEALTH DOESN’T EXIST.
IF THERE IS NO ME,
MENTAL HEALTH DOESN’T EXIST.
The attempt to highlight the struggle of racialized, Afro-descendant, non-White, Afro-Diasporic women, and as we want to call ourselves, by controlling our lives and bodies from an inclusive, transectional, non-ethnocentric and decolonizing perspective, is scandalously recent. So much so, that the mere task of documentation required to write with some credibility on a subject as relevant as mental health in reference to the “non-normative”, becomes the first workhorse.
I firmly affirmed our “non-existence” in terms of clinical studies. Not even the statement of what a “stressor” means outside the universalizing concept of a White and bourgeois woman that carries the banner of modern psychological intervention with incorporated feminism. I witness with a feeling of helplessness my own abduction, in that the criteria of the APA (American Psychological Association) and the clinical manual of excellence on psychological disorders, DSM in the US and CIE in Europe, with successive versions to adapt to the times which are not based on representative samples of the population but biased.
I will give an example: the concept of a “stressful life event” does not include elements that may be for me, or be perceived by other non-White women.
It does not include the feeling of social exclusion based on ethnicity, the continuous hyper-presence and involuntary hyper-exposure of our phenotypical characteristics as they are not the most prevalent for the majority, the hyper-sexualisation, the continuous effort to “fit in”, everyday micro-racism episodes, etc.
This implies the invisibility of psychological suffering, the negation of our subjectivity, the perspective that considers us “subjects”, not only bodily, but provided with a feminine and non-White “I/Me”.
They resort, then, from a distance, to the application of stereotypicity in our psychic characteristics, treating us, in any case, as Schopenhauer would say of “the female” in nature when referring to women in general, but adding the Eurocentric and colonial perspective.
I therefore assume that there is no other option to address the issue than generating our own scale arising from autodidacticism.
The modern colonial system, which attached gender, established a unique way of being a woman, by means of imposed standards and norms, which implies the absence of intersectionality and systematically ignoring ethnicity, socialization, diverse contexts, etc, so these oppressions have continued in the field of mental health practice.
The emergence of all those women who need to be moved from “non-being” category to “being” is pending, resignifying “being a woman” from an ethnic subjectivity / non-White / migrant / Diasporic. These turn then collective knowledges, based on time into concrete experiences not typified, configured by particular conditions, material, physical and symbolic, emotional, narrative that define the experiences. From here, mental health can be established as an applicable topic.
This implies the invisibility of psychological suffering, the negation of our subjectivity, the perspective that considers us “subjects”, not only bodily, but provided with a feminine and non-White “I/Me”
The modern colonial system, which attached gender, established a unique way of being a woman, by means of imposed standards and norms, which implies the absence of intersectionality and systematically ignoring ethnicity, socialization, diverse contexts, etc, so these oppressions have continued in the field of mental health practice.
What is an externalised and excluding vision?
Analysing the general trend of the establishment towards what, for example, is a highly stressful factor for us, known as racist manifestations, I conclude that personality traits which have been institutionalised and normalised that applied to an individual would constitute a psychopathological syndrome, but that, paradoxically, when they are extrapolated to the predominant sociocultural system, they don’t fall in this category.
Let’s stop at the “anecdotizating” of racist aggressions, the tendency of the system to turn such a powerful and daily stress factor for us into an isolated event, when it is institutional.
This constitutes the generalization and acceptance of a psychopathological trait, the denial, the selective vision or even fictitious vision by an entire society, therefore we witness a certain degree of collective psychopathology. It sounds alarming, but one of the defining elements of it is the absence of empathy.
Then, I conclude, that an individual psychopathological trait, when raised to a “collective unconscious”, evidences a “disturbed society” by denialism and non-empathy.
This impregnates the life experience of those who do perceive it, those who suffer, can not deny it, as a generator of stress in different degrees, transformed into an enveloping halo, a continuous temporal space in which we are immersed. With another twist, a general and exogenous pathology that promotes the emergence of psychological disorders and / or symptoms, such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, lack of self-esteem, deformation of the self-concept from childhood or in adulthood and a string of emotional obstacles that not only invade our minds, but, which are being processed continuously by the brain, and can become somatised, so that cases appear, and not only a few, of hyper-reaction of the autonomic nervous system, malaise, fatigue and wear.
Yes, ladies, racism kills, and it is a highly stressful life event even if it’s anecdotal for the system and institutional for us.
More contradiction:
what constitutes the evolutionary response of stress, is universal in the human being before what is a “stressor”. Nevertheless, it becomes “particular”, inflicted and “invisible”, for WOC because it’s not perceived by the majority. This “non-existence” doesn’t exist, certainly disconcerting for those who perceive it, it connotes its hyper-presence which is an usually individual experience, not verbalised, lived in isolation, repressed from the Afro-Diasporic and feminine perspective, like a laser beam. On the side, for the majority group, which doesn’t suffer its consequences, it is ignorable, deniable, diluted in the amplitude of the norm and the “otherness”.
This statement arises, as a pressing need:
to analyse my own mental health as a non-White woman, and that of other Women Of Colour, I must analyse, as a professional, the mental health of the oppressive group which doesn’t even recognise any problem in this respect.
My self-definition as to the process of creating an “I/Me” to be, depending on how that “I/Me” was perceived by the others from the perspective of otherness, this actual “I/Me” doesn’t even belong to me at all. Few women of our collective will be able to say that they have never felt alienation of perception about what is and what is not stressful from our own experience, through majority imposition, which is pathological from the perspective of self-perception or from alterity.
However, one can’t fall into the trap of affirming that the racist attitude or the racist act inherent in an individual, commits him or her to psycho-pedagogy, taking into account the personal fact, since if this were so, the mitigation of unintentionality could be applied, and the lack of responsibility and inability to discern, when it is not so.
These are acts propitiated by an extremely deep internalization of White privilege and other notions of Whiteness granted by centuries of a colonisation and supremacist status quo, which establishes our own mental enslavement and at the same time of others, becoming our own hegemonic and assimilated colonising attitude, statistically normalised by the number. Even so, it is undeniable that extrapolating to the system, it can be characterised as plagued by psychopathological features diluted by the lack of visibility for the oppressor.
As a conclusion to this first part, which emphasises on how the psyche of non-White, Afro-descendant, Black, mixed-race women, is undertaken(or simply not)by the system and environment that envelops us, I invite to reflect on the reason why, as an expert in mental health, I can’t separate the analysis of my symptomatology, from what I perceived as “stress factor” or psychologically negative, from the vision of the system itself, which tends towards denial, to calibrate the stress levels in a qualitatively different and biased way. Why is it that my subjectivity is perceived as hyperbolic (I am very susceptible), anecdotal (by chance), tacit (ignore it), and if I don’t agree to react as established by the norm of an ethnocentric and excluding psychosocial framework, I end up being “A crazy woman”, with all that this entails as a stigmatising burden.
I continue with a second part in which our experiential self-definition clarifies these questions.
SELF-PERCEIVED MENTAL HEALTH:
OUR MIND EXISTS
What affects us psychologically as Women Of Colour, Afro-descendants, migrants?
What do we perceive as emotional suffering?
Here I pose a series of questions for which each of us will have an answer.
What is the result of the evolutionary development of subjectivity in this environment?
What is the impact of the entire denial system, normalised by racism, universalising the concept of Woman that excludes us in the creation of a single, undivided-self, with sufficient self-esteem, to gain self-worth and value, based on an imposed undervaluation?
Which vulnerability does this ecological niche generate, psychologically stressful, in terms of symptoms and psychopathological syndromes, caused in an exogenous way, but so internalized at times that they break the lines of our personality?
What is the effect of acculturation or the Diasporic uprooting?
How does a Black girl forge an identity, growing without seeing her corporeality represented, a part from her own mirror image or her brief reflection shared with other girls of her same condition, having a phenotype perceived as anomalous for the predominant White gaze?
I must stress that clinical psychology or social psychology, can’t answer all these questions. A self-taught and revindicative paradigm must be generated whose reference framework is self-generated.
There is, for example, the self-guilt syndrome believing to be the root of the problem, due in part to the deep internalisation of the established ethnocentric order and self-denial, and depending on the context in which the woman finds herself, for the supposed empirical demonstrations that she daily observes, since she absorbs the false idea that normality is habituality, and there are sometimes no ways to contradict this theory, which ends up becoming dogma.
The Post-traumatic Slavery Syndrome exists, this is the only type of disorder that I have found documented which recognises this specific type of stress factor that this condition assumed and supposes.
This condition and its severity, according to Dr Joy DeGruy, is the undeniable consequence of the multi-generational oppression experienced and originated from trauma.
See what it entails:
Insufficient development Self-esteem.
– Hopelessness.
– Depression.
– Self-destructive perspective.
– Propensity to anger and violence.
– Extreme feelings of suspicion.
– Racist socialization or internalized racism.
– Learned helplessness.
– Distorted self-concept.
– Disgust for the members of one’s own racial group members, because of cultural and traditional habits, in addition to phenotypical traits and characteristics
It should be clarified that all these effects have an exogenous origin, it never constitutes a definition of what we are, nor a generalisation, but it is very close to what can characterise some of our reactions to the psychological stressors that we perceive.
For this, it’s necessary to personalise, exemplify by enlightening certain cultural myths, experiential episodes that provide content and dynamics to schemes that don’t constitute a definition but an analysis of what our way of being in the world supposes, derived from differential psychological needs.
The psycho-emotional consequences that we can suffer as Afro-descendants or Women Of Colour are not an inherited psycho-genetic consequence, it would be a reductionist and biological vision. These vulnerabilities are not inherited per se, but persist to the extent that the social, historical and environmental factors that generate them do so. It is the condition of a sociocultural framework that submits us to processes and interactions of stereotypicity, prejudices, and, let’s call it by its rightful name:
– Offences.
– Insults.
– Humiliations.
– Rejection.
– The harmful subtlety of language.
– Gestures.
– Questioning.
– Omission.
– Invisibility.
– Minimisation.
– Folklorization.
– Trivialisation.
– Hyper-sexualization.
Despite the well-known stereotype of “the strong, angry and scandalous Black woman”, the statistical reality tells us that the most frequent reactions are exactly the opposite, always with data of a non-epidemiological clinical nature for a single person, since as a group we are not represented, so this is what we find:
inaction, impotence, passivity.
The most experienced experience / sensation / complex emotion is shame, which leads to silence and isolation, so that the psycho-pathological syndromes derived from racism are lived in solitude, which contributes to their aggravation, due to the absence of receptive collective spaces that propitiate the expression or verbalisation, in a safe and protected way.
It’s a pending issue and of extreme urgency for its need in the social niches where the Diaspora has established itself.
It’s important not to fall into the trivialisation, served on a platter by Whiteness and its comfort zone, having as the perfect shield the myth of the strong Black woman capable of supporting everything or anything thrown at her, because we legitimise their right to continue imposing any degree of emotional suffering.
We shouldn’t categorise among ourselves as “weak” those who are affected by what would harm any human being.
We need in my opinion, to promote sorority from the recognition of what affects us and how it affects us, regardless of whether we consider ourselves racialized, migrants, people of African descent, Afro-descendants, Blacks, Africans or simply non-White.
Feeding a climate of mutual support, not denying our vulnerability, since otherwise we fall into the loop of : not being seen as vulnerable, as woman, as person, or human subject. While we are women of African descent, with all the diversity that it entails in every respect, we must also feel psychologically supported, listened to, made visible, sororized.
We need in my opinion, to promote sorority from the recognition of what affects us and how it affects us, regardless of whether we consider ourselves racialized, migrants, people of African descent, Afro-descendants, Blacks, Africans or simply non-White
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And what do I ask the world that is enough with itself, for it to walk by my side guiding my senses?
