The Glass Box

I was thinking yesterday about the glass ceiling and how it has operated in my life. Then this morning I thought, no, for black women, it's more like a glass box. So I started thinking about the glass box and how annoying it is to hit the boundaries. I was asked recently would I like to apply for a job, but one of the criteria was NIH grants. Well, I might be a well-known researcher, but I've never been able to get an NIH grant. I am not alone in this, as science has shown that minority researchers are not funded at the rates of white researchers, in part because of the questions they ask. Of course, asking the government to fund you to look at why the government is bad is a "How long have you been beating your wife?" proposition. 

But then I thought not about the boundaries, but about the interior of the box. I am not in a solitary coffin. All the black, brown, red and yellow people of the world are in the box and we are really quite busy. Add us all up and we are billions. It is not lonely or boring or frightening. It is amusing and weird and joyful. It is home. 

All the people in box become our teachers, which is why Akeelah and the Bee rings so true. A white friend said he was sad that Ta-Nehisi Coates had to prepare his son to face racism. I thought, "Thank God." It's only the preparation that gets us on solid ground. 

As a teenager, I fought the acceptance of this fact with all my heart and soul. Like all painful truths, I had to pass through the depression that comes with painful truths, in this case, that I would hit limits not related to my abilities. But, having passed through that phase, I could relax into reality. I could embrace my possibilities and fight my limits. One of my father's many sayings was, "Lower your buckets where ye may," possibly a version of a line from Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech. My dad did not accept racial injustice, but he knew he had to do what he could wherever he was. When I didn't get NIH grants, I looked around for other ways to study the crises of the ghetto. There were many. Much to my pleasure, I have been able to document how the government is treating us in eight books and more than a hundred papers. 

Thinking about my white friend, it occurred to me that most white people are not prepared by their parents. They can't see the racism, and therefore live in a delusional state. The consequences of this are terrible for them and for all of us. We can see this in the coronavirus pandemic. Clearly, white people have decided that this illness hits black and brown people and they are safe to party on. This is not how it works -- concentration is not containment -- and their actions growing out of racist assumptions are having horrifying consequences for the nation. 

Like many other black psychiatrists, I think of racism as a mental illness. Unlike many other mental illnesses, this illness can be cured. I have known lots of white people who faced the lie of racism and rejected it. As Lucian K. Truscott IV wrote in the New York Times, visit Monticello. You'll see the whole story there: the Big House AND the slave cabins. Guides will tell you, as mine did, about Jefferson's psyche. He grew up with black children, one of whom became his stablemaster. When that man died, Jefferson simply asked, "Who will replace him?" No words of mourning for his childhood friend. This is not normal, and I say that speaking as a psychiatrist. Truscott invites us to move out of the delusion by taking down Jefferson's memorial in Washington, which is a one-sided celebration, and going to Monticello for the whole story. Imagine: not only is racism a mental illness but also it can be cured by tourism.

The glass box that has placed limits on my productivity has not been the last word in my life. But imagine the world we might have, the energy we would liberate, if we stopped boxing some people in and forcing others to live in a delusion? As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, 

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.

There is hope for us. I am reminded of 1 Corinthians 13:12, which taught,  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known."