Month: June 2021

I’ve been an observer of human behavior my entire life. At one point in high school after taking two psychology classes, I thought I might want to become a psychologist. Thankfully, I was able to shadow an actual psychologist for a day and that experience completely erased that notion from my mind. I couldn’t fathom listening to people’s emotional traumas and mental health issues all day. However, I am extremely grateful for those individuals who feel called to do this important work and who have the training and emotional capacity to do it well. I’ve even visited them on several occasions to help me deal with particularly difficult times in my life. I found that their empathetic probing and great listening skills were life savers. Seeing a good therapist to help navigate difficult life situations can steer us away from our base killer instincts. I’ve recommended therapy to family members and my students over the years. Those who followed my advice were helped and I wonder how many actual lives are saved by investing in therapy as opposed to guns.

I don’t have a chronic mental health struggle like some, but I am human and so strong emotions can be triggered. I believe there are people with chronic anti-social mindsets. Whether their issue stems from nature or nurture or a combination of both is not the issue. The issue is making therapy much more accessible early on to help these individuals curb their own impulses before they self-destruct or destroy others. Our former president, Donald J. Trump was one of those individuals whose mental health issues have caused and continue to cause great damage to our nation and to individual lives. His pathologies were so obviously dangerous that psychologists broke their own code of ethics to warn the public by exposing the anti-social tendencies they saw. His niece, who is a psychologist, wrote a book about his need to win and his sociopathic mindset. Without apology, she announced that he is not only unfit, but dangerous as a president. For the sake of society, parents, family, teachers, pastors, doctors, and friends need to recommend therapy more often when people around them are struggling.

The times when seeing a therapist meant the most to me were during instances when I recognized that my anger at being unfairly treated could lead to destructive behavior if allowed to fester. There are times when talking things out with a friend. pastor, teacher, or family member is enough, but there are other times when the hurt, frustration, and anger are so overwhelming that one could potentially inflict permanent damage on oneself or others. I acknowledge that in those times, a therapist was able to stand between me and my killer instincts. Thankfully, I didn’t have access to a gun to commit murder, but I recognized that my words can be a pretty lethal weapon too.

The first time I went to therapy was to deal with loss. In the span of a few years, I lost both of my parents and then endured a surprise divorce stemming from my ex-husband’s infidelity. I was so hurt by the betrayal that rage was bubbling up inside me. Not only was I a mother bear wanting to protect her cubs from yet another loss, but I was a woman scorned and tossed aside. Therapy helped me connect with my better angels so that I could continue to be a good mother and regain my worth as a woman. I regained my self-esteem and learned that while I cannot control the bad behavior of others, I can control how I respond to that behavior in a way that preserves life, dignity, and healthy boundaries. Therapy gave me the strength not to transfer my anger towards their father onto to my children, but to use it to build an even better life for myself and them. That it what I did. I also came to understand that despite everything, I really wanted my children to retain a good relationship with their father and that I had the power to explicitly give them that permission. The therapist helped me listen to my heart and my rational mind so that I wasn’t so overwhelmed by my killer instincts that I burned the whole house down, destroying all of us in the process.

The second time I spent time in therapy had to do with being falsely accused at work by a superior and suffering the consequences of those false accusations. It was through therapy that I was able to deal with my emotions and develop a course of action that preserved my dignity, integrity, and didn’t get me fired because I loved my job. Therapy helped me come to terms with the reality that the perpetrators might go unpunished and how I could turn my current lemons into lemonade. The skilled therapist pulls the answers out of the client by asking the right questions and actively listening. The answer to overcoming our killer instincts is good therapy. I understand the rage of individuals who take a gun to their former workplace and kill everyone in sight. I truly believe that people around the murderer knew he was struggling but failed to get him to a good therapist.

Too many people in our nation right now are acting on their killer instincts. They are scared, angry, and frustrated by injustice, afraid of change and a fear of losing what they wrongly believe is theirs. Without receiving help from family, friends, teachers, pastors, or a therapist, we will see a continuation of the mass shootings, the riots, and the ridiculously hurtful twitter comments. These days it is more important than ever that we intervene when we start see our family members or friends start to stray from normal levels of fear, outrage, or frustration. Rage is plaguing our nation.

We must be honest with ourselves that our society has a problem with allowing self-promoting, money-grubbing, fear-mongers like Donald Trump, Tucker Carson, and Matt Gaetz to stoke the flames with lies to purposefully enrage otherwise stable people. They encourage greater access to guns as protection from imaginary enemies. They need to be stopped if we are going to have a society where we can live normally and have some degree of certainty that we can go to the store, to work, to church, to school, or the movies without fear of gun violence.

We can stop Tucker Carson and Donald Trump by calling them out, removing their platform, or simply not supporting them. The Capitol insurrection showed us that any human being can be pushed to act violently. There is an instinctual violence built into us for self-preservation. But what if the enemy isn’t even real? Again, our country has a burgeoning violence problem because we have a burgeoning rage problem. If we don’t stop fanning the fames by continue to allow injustice, white supremacy, and the voices of liars to prevail, the killer instincts will overwhelm our rational minds and we’ll all be prisoners in our homes because of new pandemic: violence in the streets.

As I prepare to retire this week, I hope there are many young people with the desire and the capacity to become psychologists and therapists because they are needed more than ever to help calm our rage, channel our passions, and deal with underlying mental health issues where present.

I’ve been celebrating Juneteenth in Oxnard, California for many years. It is a recognition of the end of slavery for those slaves in Texas who didn’t hear about the Emancipation Proclamation until 2 1/2 years later. Flash forward to Thursday, June 17, 2021 when, amid much fanfare, President Biden signs the bill proclaiming the date June 19th a federal holiday. Of course, more than a few Republican lawmakers opposed the bill, but thankfully they are in the minority. The same minority that promotes the big lie about a stolen 2020 election and the same folks who now want to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). I doubt that they’ve taken the time to understand what it is and even if they did, I believe they aren’t genuine in their opposition to it. But enough white moms are crying that their children are feeling guilty about being white after learning that in this country people who look like them have been afforded some advantages because of their white skin that others did not get because of their darker skin color. The truth is threatening.

I first encountered CRT when I was doing the literature review for my doctoral dissertation at UCLA. It was rooted in legal studies and analyzed the role race played in the policies and practices of American society as it related to the opportunities of racial minorities, in particular black people in the U.S. That said, we all know that the only way to fix a problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem. However, systemic racism is not a problem many on the right want to fix for selfish reasons.

If white Americans are honest with themselves, they will acknowledge that the system of slavery followed by Jim Crow, segregation, housing red lining, and desperate treatment of blacks in education, healthcare, banking, and the criminal justice system have hindered the progress of the majority of black Americans while at the same time benefiting white Americans. The system works well for people who believe in a zero-sum socio-economic game. It goes like this: If I give you fewer opportunities to succeed, then that gives me more. But for that system to continue operating, it must remain hidden because most humans also recognize and truly hate unfairness.

This racist system is a deluded way to think. Instead of wanting to support and utilize the gifts, talents, and ingenuity of the entire populace to benefit the nation, fragile white supremacist are fearful of being exposed as being on the same human level as blacks. For years, white people were brainwashed to believe in their inherent superiority based solely on the color of their skin. And now, they are witnessing the truth with their own eyes. This fear has always lead to violence. We saw it in the lynching of Blacks who dared to display their equality and we saw it in the burning of Black Wall Street. We saw it in the death threats to Jackie Robinson, Tiger Woods, and every other black American who succeeded in ways that threatened the notion of white superiority. And having the first Black president who excluded grace and intelligence seemed to drive the point home.

I’ve said it many times: humans are tribal at our core. I admit to feeling proud when I see a black person excel. But I am also thrilled on an intellectual level because I understand the additional obstacles that person had to overcome to succeed. For example, for all of post-slavery history, blacks were systematically denied the benefit of accumulating generational wealth through unfair housing, banking, job, and even insurance practices. Despite serving in wars, for many years they were often denied access to veteran benefits like the GI Bill that provided jobs, education grants to college, and housing loans. These benefits were conferred easily on white male veterans, giving them a huge head start while leaving black veterans behind to struggle.

Structural systems like that added roadblocks to black Americans but gave easy access to whites in almost every facet of American life. This is what Critical Race Theory addresses. It is evident that white politicians do not want to expose the hidden practices of discrimination that limit the upward mobility of black Americans. They prefer to keep them hidden to perpetuate the lie of a meritocracy that helps whites to succeed while continuing to believe in their superiority.

I encountered this myth with my white university students who honestly believed that black people in poverty only had themselves to blame for their poverty because they were too lazy to work. They believed everyone had been given the same opportunities as they had growing up. They believed so many blacks were in jail because they committed crimes and deserved to be there. They were unaware of the disparities in K-12 education, in targeted policing, in inequitable judicial sentencing, in housing, in job choices, and in access to capital to build businesses. Exposure to the reality of American’s racist and discriminatory history changed their viewpoint and they in turn became advocates for change. It was helpful to show them undercover news reporting that exposed how blacks even paid more for the same cars than whites. It took them seeing that the schools in black neighborhoods had far fewer basic resources than they took for granted for them to appreciate the reality of inequity.

It is important to note that I always assured my white students that while they benefited from this system, they were not to blame for it, and most importantly, they could be part of building a more inclusive and equitable country moving forward.

Critical Race Theory exposes the myth of the level playing field and that is why white Republicans want so desperately to outlaw it. They want to preserve the past in present discrimination that hampers the progress of blacks. And to do this, they understand that they must suppress their vote and the votes of educated young people who want a more just and fair society. Republicans want to continue to claim that everyone has an equal opportunity, while hiding the decades of obstacles that hinder blacks from taking advantage of opportunities. They point to the few exceptional blacks who have made it as an excuse to proclaim that America is indeed the land of opportunity if people are willing to work hard enough. Of course, they leave out the part where some people have to work exceptionally harder than others and be exceptionally more talented, creative, intelligent or lucky.

This is how past in present discrimination looks. An employer sets a minimum standard that applicants must type 50 words per minute to be eligible for the job. Sounds fair except for the fact that the blacks in the employment pool didn’t attend a school that had computers. In this country under-resourced schools in black areas is the norm. The school to prison pipeline is a very real reality because lawmakers do not want to acknowledge the underlying inequities that CRT exposes. The tragic disparities in COVID-19 deaths between blacks and whites is yet another example of how past disparities in diet, environmental pollution, and access to health care lead to pre-existing conditions among blacks that made them more likely to die from COVID-19. CRT exposes the history and current reality around these inequities.

I believe Jesus said it best, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”. Juneteenth is a celebration of the truth reaching the slaves in Texas, freeing them. Critical Race Theory is just an attempt to expose the truth of our nation’s racist history so that people of goodwill can work to set things right. After all, our nation was founded on the principle that all men are created equal and should be afforded equal opportunities under the law. If we have lawmakers who oppose this basic value, they shouldn’t be lawmakers. Of course, this is why we must protect access to voting. If we lose the ability to vote, the lies will only continue and fewer of us will be free.

When I was fourteen, I joined a branch of the Boys Scouts of America called the Law Enforcement Explorer Scouts. The Los Angeles Police Department had developed a grow your own program through scouting and I thought it would be a great experience to see if this might be a viable career path for me. I quickly learned that it wasn’t.

I was a highly successful recruit, having been awarded the “Outstanding Explorer Recruit” at graduation from a six-week training program with about 600 other teenagers at the Los Angeles Policy Academy. For six weekends, we underwent classroom training about the laws and “PT” or physical training where we went on 5 mile runs through the mountains and did all manner physical training. At the end of the six weeks of training, we were tested on our knowledge and physical fitness and I came out on top. I was really proud of myself and excited to see what came next at the local San Fernando Valley police station where I was assigned.

Needless to say, I was a law enforcement explorer scout for less than a year. The policemen with whom I interacted and overhead talking to their peers quickly convinced me that their worldview of humanity was different from mine. I saw men who seemed to view most civilians as criminals just needing to be caught doing wrong and I recognized a level of power tripping that actually frightened me. They seemed to bask in the level of power they could exert over people with impunity and they wanted me to believe this was a marvelous thing. I was repulsed to say the least. I looked to other policemen who seemed motivated to actually protect and serve to contradict what was being said and acted upon, but they were silent. Without a word of explanation, the outstanding explorer recruit for all of Los Angeles County, simply quit.

In retrospect, I realize that my training and perhaps that of police officers in general was absent any mention of the necessity of ethnics, character, integrity, and service. The motto “To protect and serve” was never unpacked as a core value. In fact, it was never even mentioned. There were no personality tests to root out the anti-social, psychopathic, power-hungry, bigoted, and just downright cruel individuals from their ranks. My distrust of the police began when I was fourteen when I saw them up close and personal. Even the good ones were too cowardly to influence the toxic culture I experienced.

Since then, I have had several interactions with the police in Ventura County, a county away from Los Angeles, where I raised my family. We, too, have a problem with racial profiling. Black and brown young men at the University where I work were routinely followed and stopped by the police. The students were traumatized by this. As the advisor to the Black Student Union (BSU) I called for a meeting between the BSU and the local police department. The first time they sent a Latino officer and he apologized for the profiling but explained that he could do nothing about it. He advised the students to be respectful and to comply with the officers’ requests. I complained how officers were following the students until they could find a reason to pull them over and how they were negatively affecting the mental well-being of our students. The complaint was met with a shrug. “Then whom are you protecting and serving?” I asked with less respect than I intended.

Another time they sent the only black police officer on the force to meet with the students. This officer pointed to the BSU president who was dressed in a green track suit, and said, “If I saw you driving on the streets in Thousand Oaks, I would find a reason to stop you.” We all gasped. His reason was that the student was by virtue of his skin color and dress a person who didn’t belong in the area and was therefore suspect. In an instant, I was fourteen again. I called the department to complain about the systemic problem and was then seated on a community panel where I took part in several one-day training sessions at the police academy to talk about the impact on community members of color when police are not there to protect and serve them, but to look for reasons to criminalize them instead.

My other interactions with police were also disturbing. I have received two speeding tickets in my life where the police officer had discretion to say, “Please slow down” instead of giving me a ticket. Neither took that route and the disparity in treatment was apparent when my white male middle-aged boss confessed that he was going 85 miles an hour on the freeway to go golfing and only got a warning. Of course, I was disgusted by this, especially because my tickets were both while driving to work.

The first was at 6:30am on a side street, just one block from home, where the speed limit had been lowered the week before. The officer stopped me and addressed me by name as he knew me from my years doing emergency foster care. He asked me if I knew what the speed limit was and I replied that it was 35 miles an hour. He informed me that it had just been changed to 30 miles an hour. I said okay. And then he asked me for my license and registration. It was at that moment that I realized he was going to give me a ticket which I knew to be unfair. I said two things to him. First, I pointed out that from the direction I was headed there was no posting of the speed limit visible. Second, I asked him whom I was endangering that a ticket was warranted as there was not a single other car nor a pedestrian was in sight. I already knew my fate was sealed because I recognized this police officer for who he really was: a white man who could exercise authority over a black woman in a BMW in an affluent neighborhood. I just wanted him to know that I recognized him for the kind of officer he actually was.

The second ticket was along similar lines. On my way to work in a brand new car with a bigger engine and more power and so I hadn’t realized my speed, which actually wasn’t that excessive. I explained that to the officer but he gave me a ticket anyway. Again, no grace nor mercy for people of color in this area. The next time I was stopped, the officer actually had no reason as I quickly exclaimed that I was going the speed limit. The officer asked me where I was going? Home, I said. Where I was coming from? The movies, I said. And then he let me go. What the hell was that? I was shaken and angry by the mental abuse.

And finally, my son was injured after a neighbor sent his dog after him. While in the emergency room getting stitches, a policemen appeared to take the required police report. My son explained the events and the officer appeared to listen and take notes. However, when I requested the police report for my attorney, I learned that the officer never filed the report, completely against department policy. At my insistence, the police department sent a different officer to our home to take a new report. My hope is that that officer was reprimanded, but I seriously doubt it.

What is clear from my perspective is that police reform is long overdue. You know there is a problem when you believe you can’t call the police even if someone is breaking into your home because you know the police will shoot your 6’4″ black husband. People of color keep learning the hard way that police are likely to shoot to kill your mentally ill child if you call them. Police are not mental health professionals and we should not ask them to do this work under any circumstances. I am not for defunding the police, but I am for funding community health care crisis managers and for major police reform.

The reform that needs to take place begins with whom they hire. The current problem is in the police screening process and their training. They need to refrain from hiring individuals who exhibit qualities and character traits that are incompatible with the motivation to protect and serve. They need to remove those officers who demonstrate qualities incompatible with these values. And finally, they need to focus officer attention on de-escalation techniques, dealing with actual crimes and true community threats. They should give warnings for minor offenses like selling loose cigarettes and not seeking to arrest folks who are no danger to society. Walking down the street should not be provocation for being stopped and questioned. Driving to school in a nice car shouldn’t automatically trigger suspicion.

Our country would be better off if the police were actually hired, trained, and deployed to protect and serve everyone, including people like me. That’s really what the Black Lives Matter movement is about. The time for better policing is now because we all deserve better.

History has shown us that when humans with opposing views can’t or won’t find a middle ground in which to reside together peacefully, they resort to violence. My greatest fear is that America is once again heading in the direction of civil war. The most tragic thing about this potential disaster is that the conflict is again rooted in the baseless lie of white supremacy. This lie dates back to the founding of this country and eventually resulted in the American Indian Wars and a Civil War that ended 400 years of slavery. However, the lie lives on in the hearts and minds of some white people. At sake in another war is the loss of innocent lives, economic disaster, and perhaps a permanent loss of our Constitution, democracy, trust in government, and freedom.

To sugarcoat the big lie, Republican leaders, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and their fake news outlets are peddling a bunch of more palatable lies to garner the support of white Evangelical Christians. They repeatedly convey the alarming message that they are losing their country and their religious freedoms. Instead of openly admitting their desire to protect and defend white supremacy and white privilege, they instead accuse democrats of being election stealers, baby killers, anti-law enforcement, socialists who drink the blood of children, pedophiles, and Jews trying to control minds through 5G technology and microchips planted through COVID-19 vaccinations. They convince white Evangelicals that their heterosexual marriages, sis gender identity, and sexuality are under threat. It’s doubtful that the advocates of these ridiculous accusations genuinely believe this shit (yeah I said it), but they are actively recruiting supporters who are sufficiently afraid and enraged to be willing to take up arms if necessary to defend themselves against a made-up enemy.

The white supremacist fostering these lies understand that the majority of white Americans hate being viewed as racists and have some level of shame about our nation’s history. That is why they deny the existence of white privilege and oppression, and why they seek to suppress history and to silence the voices of advocates for diversity, inclusion, and equity with spurious claims about reverse discrimination whenever companies or schools attempt to give “previously closed” opportunities to people of color and LGBTQ individuals. Keeping a system of oppression in place benefits heterosexual white people and that is what an impending civil war would be about.

These instigators understand human nature enough to know that racial, religious, and political tribalism operates at the subliminal level and that self-preservation is a basic human instinct. Convince a tribe that they are in danger and they will arm themselves for a fight. And that is precisely what is happening now.

The white supremacist young man who entered a black church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine people said that he was hoping to start a race war. He was premature because the groundwork hadn’t been fully laid. Enter Donald Trump and his blatant empowerment of white nationalism. The media gave too little attention to the praise of the 2nd Amendment as a tool to fight the government by Congressman Matt Gaetz at his rally last week. It was a dog whistle for white supporters to take up arms. The word is leaking out here and there with comments from Mike Flynn and others. And just this past week, a conservative California Federal judge overturned the 30-year ban of automatic assault rifles in California, comparing an AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife. The judge called these weapons “a perfect combination of home defense and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle.” Battle against whom exactly? Fellow Americans?

If white supremacists can’t reverse the move toward greater diversity, inclusion and equity through voter suppression or their army of conservative judges whom they strategically put in place, then they are willing to take over this nation through violence. They are arming themselves as I write this and continuing to incite unsuspecting white Americans to violence and ultimately civil war. And then we all lose except for the few rich media investors, gun makers, and white supremacists leaders who will gain power and profit from it.

The time to sound the alarm is now. It’s not time to dance around the issue of white supremacy that once again threatens our country’s people. It’s time to be vocal, not silent. We can not afford to be apathetic in the face of this clear and present danger. Remember that six millions Jews were slaughtered because the German people allowed lies to feed their white supremacist protectionist instincts. I’m hopeful that we will learn from history and not repeat it. In every election moving forward, we must take the opportunity to rid ourselves of white supremacist in every leadership role. It is time to only vote for those who appreciate our diversity and have a record of actively working toward inclusion and equity.