I recently had the opportunity to see the Head Nerd, Dr. Melissa Harris Perry, live at Wake Forest University. She recently took the position of Presidential Chair and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University which is located in the county I live in.
Forsyth County for the WIN!
Obviously, the presence of Dr. Harris Perry in Winston Salem means there will be many more opportunities to hear from her personally and let me tell you...Melissa unfiltered is quite the treat!
Y'all know she can't say everything she wants to say on TV but this was a non-streamed event and Melissa brought it. She brought all of it!
So this event was a fundraiser for Triad Mental Health which serves the larger community with resources for those suffering for mental illness as well as educating the public at large about mental health. So Melissa, ever the scholar, took an interesting position on the issue and I took notes.
Yup, notes.
I don't play.
So let's get into it because there's a ton to discuss.
Dr. Harris Perry set up this conversation with the idea the one can be absent of health without actually being ill. Plenty of people aren't sick but that doesn't mean they are healthy. Similarly, happiness isn't mental health. Happiness is momentary. She made the argument that mental health is about being able to experience negativity and rebound. Its about robust resiliency. Just as happiness isn't mental health, she proposed that joy might be because joy, which represents connectivity and belonging, allows for continuous reinforcement of who you actually are outside of the negative experience and isn't situational.
As a political scientist, Dr. Harris Perry had to make a political argument and it was brilliant. She offered that mental health is a requirement of democracy. If our founding document says "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," then we are endowed by our creator with being about to have happiness and by extension joy and mental health. She went on to say that Health is not solely or primarily located in the body of the patient but in politics. A sick people is a symptom of a sick democracy.
I know right...y'all I was like "Girl....just roll that argument right on out cause I'm ready to receive!"
She then took it back to Jefferson and good ol' Monticello. In our founding document, the government instituted the protection of happiness as a puristic. We have the right to flourish in a democracy.
Now Jefferson was an interesting character and in "Notes on Virginia" we find out that Jefferson studied the slaves. He really studied them! Jefferson came to some interesting albeit false conclusions depending on your interpretation.
Jefferson observed that the Black nature had no meaningful or enduring emotional wound from captivity and loss. This conclusion is crucial for him to continue to hold his fellow human beings in slavery. You can't believe that you're making a lasting negative impression and continue to be the created of the negativity. Those are incongruent ideas. You must believe that chattel slavery isn't painful for the people you subject to it.
Dr. Harris Perry then cited a study that showed that at 5 years old, children believed that all other people experience pain in the same ways they do. When asked does it hurt more if a Black person or White person hits their head, they believe it hurts the same. By 7, they believe to some degree that it hurts a White person more and by 10 they firmly believe that Black bodies hurt less. I thought this was an interesting point. The myth of the strong Black body starts very young and isn't being explicitly taught but picked up by young people anyway.
Dr. Harris Perry then moved into an interesting argumentative space. She stated that there are lots of areas of injustice that can be explained away. Lots of things can be attributed to decisions individuals make even if a much larger system is at fault. Poverty, lack of education, and a myriad of other socioeconomic disadvantages are often thought the caused by a lack of initiative or drive when one can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps with no boots. She then gave infant mortality as an example. She said no one ever tries to attribute the death babies to class. Babies shouldn't die no matter who they are born to and that is something Americans believe across the board. She went not to discuss something I've known for years. I'm sure it was news to the greater population who sat in Wake Chapel.
The race of a baby's mother can be used as a predictor for a negative outcome because children born to Black mother, regardless of education level or income, are twice as likely to die. Die. We are still talking about babies and we are also talking about death. Tiny coffins that shouldn't exist are purchased twice as often by Black mothers.
Dr. Harris Perry then offered looking at the body politic as a way to determine where this heartbreaking statistic finds its origin. And she took us there.....straight to patriarchy.
Privilege, status, and property were all patrilineal in inheritance for White people. In slavery, inheritance was matrilineal. Every White woman who gave birth knew they were passing on everything their child's father had to their child but enslaved women were passing on something different. The first gift an enslaved woman gave her child was slavery. She referenced the movie "Beloved" wherein Sethe killed her daughter so she wouldn't have to endure chattel slavery. Dr. Harris Perry summed this up by saying that we live in a place where one group of people lived kiting that pregnant was passing on slavery. To think there aren't residual health issues carried on in a historically enslaved people is preposterous.
However, Dr. Harris Perry pointed out that Black women often don't have mental health issues. The average Black woman has a net worth of $5. Not $500 or $5,000. Five $1 bills. And Black women aim to spend every last cent! Black women literally have nothing but we are never the ones that kill ourselves statically. Mental health wise, we are staying. We may be sick but we aren't crazy. And that sick for us is high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and any number of co-morbidities associated with those medical issues.
So then we should ask ourselves "Can the tools we use to measure mental health see what they are meant to measure? Are we asking the right questions?" Dr. Harris Perry sighted changes in the DSM in the 1970s that characterized schizophrenia as hostility and projected anger and its associated behaviors. Black people were subsequently diagnosed very aggressively as schizophrenic. Now let's remember the 1970s....there were reasons for hostility and hostile behavior. The DSM made a disease fit a behavior and Black men remain over diagnosed to this day. If we presume something is an illness, it becomes one.
Dr. Harris Perry then brought it home. Black people don't appear to be sick because you're looking in the room place. Actually being sick in our physical bodies is our mental illness. It is the diabetes and the hypertension. Inequality is the womb in which these illnesses were nurtured and continue to find sustenance.
Dr. Harris Perry then explored John Henryism and the Sojourner truth syndrome in Black men and women respectively. John Henryism is an active coping style that says if I just work harder it will all work out. John Henryism also creates cardiovascular disease. It is my top hypothesis for why Black men in my family around the time of slavery and it abolishment dropped dead of heart attacks. You can't out work a broken system. Similarly, Sojourner Truth Syndrome in Black women is an active coping style complicated by low resources that creates enduring negative physiological effects on the women that use it. You are literally killing poor people by telling them to work harder. Your response to inequality of working hard to over come is has very real, lasting negative consequences. Inequality is exiting a price on Black bodies.
Dr. Harris Perry went on to say that the real work of mental health is about change. The individual matters greatly. Never leave a man behind is an American belief that we hold dear. Unfortunately, individual suffering and healing can't cure the system. We have to be as interested in curing the body politic as we are in an individual patient.
Melissa really brought it y'all. We were all sitting there like "Lawd how can I make an appointment to see this woman and give her a topic and just let her talk?!?! I just want to sit at her feet and soak up all this wisdom and knowledge!" She was phenomenal y'all. Just fantastic!
So y'all know that when question and answer time came I would make my way to the mic to speak to the Head Nerd herself. Yup...I asked Melissa a question and she answered it! ::insert happy dance here::
Wanna here it? Here it go!
"My name is Philise and I'm a PhD Candidate in Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Nebraska Medical Center."
Dr. MHP: "What are you doing here?"
Me Internally: "OMGGGGGGGG She's actually listening to the words coming out of my mouth!!!"
Me " My lab got bought by UNC- Chapel Hill."
Dr. MHP: "Figures."
Me: "So I'm about to have my PhD, my dad has a PhD, and my mom has a graduate degree. We can't be more educated than we so what does the data say I can do to ensure my baby lives if I can't educate myself out of that situation?"
Dr. MHP: "You're not gonna like this answer."
Dr. Harris Perry went on the say that there isn't really anything that can be done to make sure my personal baby isn't affect by this statistic. She did say that often time the damage done to the physical body is a result of childhood inequality and discrimination and I have thankfully experienced essentially none of that. She said that having experienced none of that means that the propensity for illness isn't a part of my personal body but on a larger scale, Dr. Perry stated that the real way to change this is systemic. The system needs to stop supporting inequality and Black babies will have a better shot at life.
The truth!
She was everything I was hoping for! Dr. Melissa Harris Perry will see me in many more audiences that she has for the public to consume. I just can't get enough of the Head Nerd. I want to sit at her feet, offer a topic and a question, and just soak up all that brilliance. She's my kind of superstar.
