On the psychological effects of living in a black ghetto.

In The Twilight of American Culture, historian and social critic Morris Berman paints a revealing portrait of the psyche of his students at a Washington D.C. inner-city charter school, which sought to keep black teenagers out of jail.

Many of the students move in a kind of fog that is almost impossible to describe; you have to see it to understand what I’m talking about. It would be easy to think that these kids are lazy, or dumb, but, for the most part, that is not what is going on. Rather, they have been robbed of their motivation, and therefore their identity. I came away with a deep respect for the energy they had been able to retain, given the context of an oppressed subculture of poverty, drugs, violence, and family incarceration. When I asked one girl to define concurrent (we were working on vocabulary), she said, “Like in jail terms.” Another student wrote a short story (one page) about working as a cook in a restaurant and roasting his classmates in an oven […] Living at this level of survival, rage, and emotional immediacy, these students had no interest left over for any serious study; it was abstract, meant absolutely nothing to them. The flip side of the anger was the fog I referred to, a kind of sleepy, out-of-it quality that they seemed to carry around with them like an aura, and which I believe was depression […] Care, attention, and ambition were foreign concepts because there were no meaningful social context for such notions to exist, and no consequent motivation.¹

With this portrait of the psychological state of his students, Berman makes it clear that the confinement, segregation and lack of prospects of a black ghetto have an indisputable echo in the mental condition of its inhabitants. This issue has been used as an argument to legitimize the existence of these terrible places and perpetuate the racism that engenders them. Thus, a situation arises in which not only is a portion of the population isolated and discriminated against, but the results of the discrimination are used as evidence of their supposed inferior condition. If blacks (or Jews, or gypsies, any embodiment of alterity…) do not show ambition and willingness to lead better lives, it is not because their situation limits their possibilities, it is because it is not in them to do so. This creates a genuine vicious circle, socially inescapable, in which the victims are not only guilty of being different, of embodying alterity, but also of not being able to stop being so. A terrible place within a terrible place within a terrible place.

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1. Morris Berman, The Twilight of America Culture, 66-67. ↩︎