EchoBlog

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Black Negation” by Allen M. Price. Allen is a writer from Rhode Island. He was a finalist for the 2024 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship as well as Witness Magazine’s 2024 Nonfiction Contest. He has an MA from Emerson College.

‘Once you label me you negate me’

Søren Kierkergaard

My mother believed our white next-door neighbors, a Trump-supporting husband and wife couple, were talking to her through her mind. The symptoms of her delusion began to show halfway through 2021. She believed they were white supremacists trying to rid the country of us Negroes. They spoke to her most when she was in her bedroom. My mother believed their Ring doorbell, which was directly across from her bedroom window, was spying on her. The voices told her one morning that the wife said she had entered our house in the middle of the night and implanted a listening device inside of my mother’s brain. Their plan: to slowly make her go crazy, sending her to a mental institution, never again able to vote in another election. 

They berated her about the “Biden for President” yard signs on our front lawn, repeatedly said that she was the N word and said that Black lives don’t matter. To get them to stop, my mother banged pots and pans on the kitchen hardwood floors, slammed 20-pound dumbbells on her bedroom floor all night long, ran in and out of the house in the wee hours of the morning hoping to catch them in some sort of act, and stood on the porch, which was on the side of their driveway, watching them from the moment they came home from work. As time passed, another voice appeared who my mother laughed and giggled and chatted with as a friend. In May of 2023, she sprayed the husband with the hose while he was in his front yard. He called the police but didn’t press charges until she did it again in June. The husband knew my mother was unwell and asked that she be taken to the hospital for treatment. The ambulance took her to Rhode Island Hospital where she was put under an emergency stay in the psychiatric ward for a week. Having worked in the psychiatric department for decades there, my mother fooled the doctors. She didn’t talk aloud to the voices in her head, answered all their questions correctly, and had an incredibly sunny disposition. They released her without any treatment. When she came home, I had to keep in mind that by the time the voices are loud enough for her to consciously hear them, her brain is irrevocably entrenched in maladaptive thought patterns that put her at risk of descending into madness. 

I grew fearful of my mother as the summer wore on. I would wake up to her standing over my bed saying “Allen” and videoing me with her cellphone. She’d rummage through my things and accuse me of stealing her stuff when she couldn’t find something she had lost. Then in August, she barged into my room, jolting me awake from a nap.

“Keys, keys,” she said. “My keys.”

“Get outta my room,” I said, jumping up out of my bed, half asleep. “Get out of here. “Get outta my stuff.” I was scared, angry, and fatigued. She’d never just come into my room without knocking, much less rummage through my things.

“You’ve my keys,” she said, stepping towards. “Whach you gonna do, huh? Whach you gon do?” 

She was in my face. Suddenly I felt her hit my face. I was stunned. My mother didn’t spank me as a child. I didn’t get hit even when I was 13 years old and threw a party where one of my friends smashed the living room wall in and another smashed the back screen glass door. I knew that was not my mother. Whoever it was inside that body had the capability to attack me. 

“I’m calling the police.” 

“Go ahead,” she said, walking away. “This my house. Get out it. You wit dem. I know you is. Yous spying on me for dem.”

When the police arrived, I was thankful. It was the same officer who had come out before, and he knew my mother needed help. He brought a social worker with him. I explained to her that my mother had resisted care for so long, and her ability to keep it together on the outside gave way to this. That she appeared to be speaking in tongues was, of course, alarming to me, and as far as I could remember, it sped up quickly over the course of just two months. I begged her to admit my mother to Butler, the state mental institution, before she ended up in jail or worse. My mother tried hard to convince them she was fine, but when she did jumping jacks on the walkway in front of the house, the social worker took me to the side and said she was calling for an ambulance to admit my mother. 

But when my mother arrived at Butler, she again refused treatment, and so the doctor took her to court. The judge was convinced by the doctor to keep my mother at Butler until she agreed to accept treatment, which she finally did a week later. She stayed for just over a month. 

I knew something was wrong with my mother, but I thought maybe dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, decades use of marijuana, or neurological damage from her contracting coronavirus was one of the possible causes. But while she was in the hospital, the doctor told me my mother had penned an angry, cryptic letter and delivered it to her white doctors—telling them “they would be judged and go to hell” for their part in an unjust system—during what was classified as a psychotic episode. As a child, my mother had been verbally and physically abused by white classmates and neighbors, and by 17, she had run away from home and was living on the streets until my father, who she was dating at the time, helped her get an apartment. In the letter, my mother wrote that she believed that observing the murders of the Civil Rights giants while enduring lifelong racist treatment triggered something inside of her, perhaps a fault line already created by her childhood trauma from her own family.

Never did it dawn on me my retired 69-year-old Black mother was in the advanced late stage of untreated paranoia schizophrenia.

Though she was born and raised and never lived anywhere else other than Rhode Island, my mother, a Civil Rights baby, experienced segregation, racism. Several of the white girls at her high school often tormented her with racist slurs and while the school wasn’t legally segregated, it was visible when in the classrooms and lunchroom with Blacks on one side and whites on the other. On TV, she watched the oppressive treatment of her Black brothers and sisters fighting for equality and the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. The white supremacists, Neonazis, and KKK Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and Donald Trump’s MAGA white insurrectionists storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 triggered memories of the violent racism my mother endured and witnessed during the Civil Rights Movement. All those memories she had suppressed resurfaced and caused her to have a psychotic break. The contents of her verbal delusions was a harbinger of a growing problem: the tonnage of non sequiturs racism and anti-Blackness cruelty and epithets pumps into Black minds on a daily basis and the psychic noise it can create.

“It’s an exhausting parallel reality,” the doctor told me, “but certainly makes neurological sense. A brain already wounded can only take so much before the damage becomes severe and permanent. Pile those demoralizing, suffocating incidents of racism on a life already complicated with a troubled past and the research suggests that the narrative is significantly more likely to lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis.”

“From Womb to Neighborhood: A Racial Analysis of Social Determinants of Psychosis,” a 2021 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, established that Black Americans are markedly affected by racial discrimination, police victimization, gun violence, and historical trauma caused by slavery. In addition, Black women are at increased risk for pregnancy complications, even when controlling for sociodemographic factors, which can contribute to the prevalence of schizophrenia as well. The narrative review concludes that these factors are the reason for the overrepresentation of schizophrenia diagnoses in Black Americans.

After the doctors told me this, I recalled that when I was 21 years old, my mother and I watched “Out of Darkness,” the TV movie in which Diana Ross earned a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of a young medical student battling paranoid schizophrenia. The illness caused the woman to be institutionalized 43 times and had a devastating effect on her family. Other than that, I knew nothing, I mean absolutely nothing about schizophrenia. What the doctors told me was that schizophrenia is one of the most devastating mental illnesses a person can live with. It is relatively rare, affecting only one percent of the population, but is among the hardest mental illnesses to treat. During psychiatric episodes, symptoms include hallucinations and delusions. It impairs a person’s sense of reality, ability to make decisions, and relate to other people. People who are diagnosed with schizophrenia are more likely to be unemployed, homeless, and end up in jail. It causes people to die 15 years earlier on average than the general population. Researchers have been trying to understand the underlying causes of schizophrenia, whether it’s trauma, genetics, environmental factors, or all of the above. But one thing that many researchers believe now puts people at higher risk of schizophrenia is racism. This theme has spawned many research projects, both past and ongoing. And in some of the research on racial psychosis, the association between the two is even higher than the link between smoking and cancer. 

It was stunning and sad but not surprising to learn that my mother had this going on in her head. After the George Floyd protest, I read Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth where he proposed that racism caused mental illness, including psychosis. A Black physician, psychiatrist and philosopher, Fanon was one of the first psychiatrists to suggest that the lived experience of ethnic minorities within a discriminatory colonial environment could trigger mental illness. He concluded that mental illness and racial discrimination were both forms of alienation from society, robbing people of their humanity, and were a trigger for mental pathology.

“Ya see, he touch me,” I recall my mother saying the day the footage of Floyd went viral, “I take my bat and crack his skull.” She laughed like mad. “Damn patterollers. Thats all da police are. Nutin changed.”

I knew exactly what my mother was referring to with each word and could envision the source material as her lips pinballed through my memory. It was, to my dismay, two years of quotes and quips from racist white nationalists we had heard and seen in the news and news stories from the 1960s about Black folks hosed down by fire hoses, maimed by dogs, and lynched “like rabid dogs” now bubbling up from her subconscious in an inscrutable cacophony of speech.

Media is a powerful medium, and for two years, cable news and social media aired all kinds of racist stories occurring in America. Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck as he screamed “I can’t breathe” for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Ahmaud Arbery gunned down by to white Georgian men who spit on his lifeless body and then called him a “fucking nigger.” White supremacists marching and chanting, “Whose Street? Our Streets!” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson trying to block making Juneteenth Day a national holiday. Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul attempting to block the passage of the Emmitt Till Anti-lynching Act. White nationalists shooting up grocery stores and Wal-Marts targeting Black folks and then storming the Capitol at the behest of the president of the United States. The same phrases, over and over in the same news day, every blessed day. Even to me, as it did to my mother’s unhinged mind, it read as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda.

Racism harms overtly. It sabotages physical and social environments. My mother taught me about racism before I entered elementary school where, at six years old, I asked one of my first grade classmates to play with me and he said that his parents told him he wasn’t allowed to play with niggers. She had the talk with me that white parents don’t have with their kids: even if you pump gas into the car, you get a receipt. I wore a mask to get through the day and it caused me to question what was true and white folks’ motives. Did that kid switch seats to get away from me? Is this police officer following me even though I’m not speeding? If racism has done this to my mind in my 50 years of existence, I had to accept what it had done to my mother’s. How long can anyone’s brain, especially one who has dealt with the trauma of racism, maintain that hyper vigilance and stay mentally healthy? I can’t pray it away. I can’t pill it away. I can’t run it away. And I can’t hide it away. It’s the knee on Black folks’ neck that makes us say “I can’t breathe.”

I didn’t speak or visit my mother when she was in the hospital, afraid of how she would react. I tried not to be angry, scared, or bitter that she had neglected paying the bills, and nearly losing the house, when all she needed was proper medical care. I slowly began to understand that my mother’s paranoid schizophrenia doesn’t so much create as reveal, peeling her away until she was nothing but raw subconscious. I always believed that freedom was great, freedom was the American creed. But after my mother came home and we discussed what had happened to her, I have come to realize that freedom is a chord that has three notes. One, the freedom to act outside of authority structures. Second, the freedom to contribute to one’s own political communities in various ways. Third, the freedom to dominate, to oppress. It is this freedom that us Black folk battle each day, the freedom white America doesn’t want to talk about, the freedom the early republic is based on and white nationalists want to return to.

There’s a long river through American history that delivers us to the American South where the freedom to oppress took root. It is there that the freedom to oppress became the most virulent dimension to freedom. Me, my mother and every Black American has traveled that river. Our souls have grown deep in that river. Yet underneath its guise of racial harmony, America continues to negate our Blackness. Black negation isn’t about denying skin color but refusing to identify with social burdens tied to Blackness. If there is a clear linkage between Blackness, disadvantage, and exclusion, then there’s little incentive to embrace a Black identity. It’s a rejection of the imputed disadvantages of Blackness.

It’s been six months since my mother left Butler Hospital. The anti-psychotic injection she gets each month has stopped her from hearing voices and ended her belief that the next-door neighbors are racists and trying to kill her. My mother lost two years of her life. She doesn’t remember very much of what she did during that time nor of what was going on in the country. I am grateful that she, that we didn't wind up living on the streets and that she didn’t get locked up in prison like so many people with schizophrenia. She admits that she was “sick” and now makes an effort to not let herself be consumed by cable news and social media, but she told me sticking to casual usage does not stop the noise.

“It’s like the loss lives in me,” she says, “like a scream I cannot scream.”

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