Genocidal Childhood in the Ghetto?

Young black men in the inner-city ghettos of America are being murdered, incarcerated, and executed at an alarming rate. These current inner-city conditions are the result of toxic developmental processes derived from the larger historical and social context. Below, I summarize both the social conditions and the developmental processes, and propose that they approximate a covert form of genocide.

Although African-Americans make up only 12 percent of the national population, they constitute 40 percent of the inmates in the Federal Prison system and 40 percent of those executed since capital punishment resumed in the early 1980s. Furthermore, on any given day, approximately 13 percent of all African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. As well, approximately 41 percent of homicides annually are of African-Americans. In fact, between 1978 and 1988, homicide perpetrated by African-American youths was the leading cause of death for African-American youth. The most likely victim was a black, unemployed, male 16-19 years of age, from a family with less than a $3000 annual income. Currently, firearms homicide at the hands of other African-American males is the second leading cause of death for African-American males 17 years of age and younger. (American Civil Liberties Union, 1996; Justice Department Statistics, 2001; National Crime Survey Report, 1983; FBI Crime Statistics, 1985; Violence Policy Center Statistics, 2002)

When incarceration, execution, and homicide affect the lives of so many young black men, malignant psychosocial conditions and processes are at work. I have come to believe that they are being subjected to a type of covert genocide, and I believe that its vehicle is psychodynamic in nature, involving their unconscious identification with society’s devaluation of them, which they then act out self-destructively.

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The psychodynamic development of self-destructive young black men, however, cannot be abstracted from its social and cultural milieu. The cultural conditions that promote ghetto violence include conflicts around ethnic pluralism; splits between social subgroups that facilitate devaluation and scapegoating, leading to prejudice, discrimination and poverty; deficits in social institutions including family structure; and hyper-masculine conceptions of maleness. The socialization processes that encourage such violence include: coercion in families; harsh treatment of children (e.g., physical punishment, lack of nurturance, neglect, and rejection); lack of structure and guidance, self-socialization; and observation of bloodshed. Significantly, many of these conditions and processes are similar to those that characterize societies in which overt genocide has occurred. (Ervin Staub, “Cultural-Societal Roots of Violence: The Examples of Genocidal Violence and Contemporary Youth Violence in the United States,” American Psychologist, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp. 118-125)

As opposed to whites, the history of blacks in America is replete with these violence-promoting and genocidal conditions and processes. The importing of Africans to America as slaves, and their categorization as chattel property, created simultaneously a social split and a condition of devaluation that has promoted scapegoating in various forms over the years, subjecting African-Americans to prejudice and discrimination. Slavery, followed by Jim Crow, de jure segregation into the 1960s, and de facto discrimination extending to the present, have subjected African-Americans to poverty and political disenfranchisement. The resulting ghetto milieu has eroded family structure and effectiveness.

Gains have been made in Civil Rights legislation and legal remedies to discrimination but once devaluation becomes part of a culture, it is integrated into the culture’s “deep (unconscious) structures” and there continues to exert a quiet but devastating effect. (Staub, “Cultural-Societal Roots,” p. 120) In unconscious deep structure fashion, the racist legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation have continued systematically and disproportionately to subject African-Americans to the social conditions and processes that have polluted traditionally protective community institutions and the family.

In this way, violence promoted by these social conditions and socialization processes impacts child rearing. Coping with violence as an aspect of daily life affects both the mother’s capacity to care for her child and the child’s capacity to respond, which form the attachment relationship that is the basis for all later relational experiences. What results are insecure or disorganized attachment patterns characterized by a combination of avoidance, resistance, apathy, apprehension, and aggression. (Joy Osofsky, “The Effects of Exposure to Violence on Young Children,” American Psychologist, Vol. 50 No. 9, pp. 783-786)

Thus, this toxic social context forces mothers to become the vehicle for the material, emotional, and psychological deprivation of their children. Unable to comprehend the overwhelming external forces that come to bear on their mothers, ghetto children, especially sons, begin to question mother’s worth in light of her inability to adequately provide. (Harrell B. Roberts, The Inner World of the Black Juvenile Delinquent: Three Case Studies, 1987) Additionally, they begin to feel worthless themselves as they unconsciously identify with mother’s perceived inadequacy and consciously search for an explanation for why they are deprived.

Father-absence is another characteristic of many inner-city families that has particular implications for young boys. To develop a masculine identity, a boy must dis-identify with his mother and then re-identify with a male figure. In the absence of father, the inner-city boy usually gravitates toward older antisocial young men who embody a “hyper-masculinity,” characterized by disregard for the law, defiance of authority, aggression, and sexual conquest. (Roberts, “The Inner World”) While this provides the boy with a version of how to be a man, it leaves him without the capacity to be competent in a prosocial life.

Often, the absent father is also antisocially oriented and, without being physically present, is still a center of identification. To complicate matters, mothers often devalue such a father, telling the son not to be like him without providing a constructive alternative figure for identification. In these circumstances, the boy identifies with a figure that not only lacks the prosocial competencies but is also actively devalued by the other preeminent figure in his life.

Children experience themselves as inadequate when they feel devalued, and competence and efficacy are impaired. This can lead to feelings of pathological shame, which may, in turn, disrupt the development of empathy, guilt, and an overall

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pro-social orientation. In this antisocial developmental process, the experience of inadequacy and incompetence gives rise to a negative personal identity suffused with a sense of badness, which is then reinforced as caretakers either betray him or otherwise convey to him that he is flawed and unwanted. As a defense the child then begins to practice deceit, both of other and of self. The child’s unrelenting self-contempt, now unavailable to self-examination and conscious expression due to self-deception, is actively unburdened through insensitive or aggressive acts, which are then rationalized by reference to the child’s own suffering. Progressively, the child consolidates the antisocial stance by repeatedly choosing and progressively rationalizing insensitive and aggressive behavior. Finally, the child reflexively uses rationalization rather than self-examination to understand self and relations with others, and when this rationalization is challenged, he is likely to act out destructively. (Carl Goldberg, Speaking with the Devil, 1996)

The core of this developmental process is the child’s negative personal identity suffused with hurt and shame. In the case of young black men from the ghetto, this ostensibly derives from identification with inadequate caregivers. However, these caregivers are rendered inadequate, in large measure, by the toxic social milieu created by “deep structure” racism of our society. Thus, what the young men have actually identified with through their caregivers is the larger society’s hatred of them. Suffused with incompetence and inadequacy, fueled by hopelessness and despair, they take to the street life where they kill each other or are incarcerated and sometimes executed at the hands of the criminal justice system. Death or incarceration then absents them from the lives of their sons, perpetuating this aspect of the toxic identification process.

An additional artifact of African-Americans’ internalization of societal devaluation is found in the “campaign for respect,” which may be the dynamic sine qua non of inner-city moral life. People in the inner city behave in certain ways and carry certain attitudes in order to garner the respect of others in their milieu. Disrespectful acts or attitudes directed toward them demand active rectification. Efforts in the service of upward mobility or escape from the inner-city tend to be viewed as disrespect directed toward the community as a whole. This view makes it a difficult struggle, particularly for children, as envious “street-oriented” peers engage in active efforts to spoil their attempts to avoid the street life, or leave the ghetto. Often, these spoiling efforts involve intimidation, violence, and even death. (Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, 1999)

I have proposed that the malignant social and psychological processes described above are deeply ingrained in our cultural unconscious, and are at work in the inner-city ghettos of America. Whether or not these processes are genocidal in the truest sense of the word, they are taking a gruesome toll on the African-American community and its future. Only by identifying and focusing attention on them can we move toward the greater awareness and affirmation that is necessary to promote the changes required to stem their violent consequences.

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