The Mark of Oppression

"It's a damn confusing time to be black," writes Erin Aubry-Kaplan in an article at Salon.com. "Never before in history have blacks loomed so large in the public imagination and public culture yet been granted so little space as real people."

The article takes an extended look at a new book, Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African Americans by Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander. While Alvin was going to Columbia University and staking out his future as a psychiatrist, his brother Kenneth was shooting heroin en route to an early death. Alvin calls his brother's destructive behavior a "slow motion suicide."

Ironically, black people are experiencing higher rates of depression and suicide at a time when they are entering the middle class in ever-increasing numbers. The suicide rate among young black men has doubled since 1980. Young blacks also account for 50 percent of all homicide deaths in the US in what only can be described as a form of suicide, according to Dr Poussant.

"Undoubtedly, great strength allowed black people to survive slavery and discrimination," the authors write, "but the notion that black men and women can easily handle burdens that would psychologically crush other people has been oversold."

In Georgia, a just-released report noted that the number of black males ages 15-24 who committed suicide in 1994-98 was 40 percent higher than during the same span 10 years earlier. According to Dr Allan Josephson, chief of child, adolescent and family psychiatry at MCG, quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Black males don't go to psychiatrists."

Meanwhile, from across the ocean, a seemingly unexceptional abstract of a study turned up in the NIH database - unexceptional, that is, but for two features. The study found that 53 percent of a sampling of students who visited the health service at the University of Transkei in South Africa suffered from mild to severe depression.

A quick search revealed that Transkei was a "homeland" carved out of South Africa in the 1950s as part of the government's infamous system of apartheid. In the 1970s, South Africa established Transkei as a separate "country," legally depriving its Xhosa-speaking people of what little rights they had as South African citizens. Later, when apartheid was abolished, Transkei was reincorporated into South Africa, along with citizenship for its residents.

The study abstract makes no attempt to connect the dots, but it is fair to assume that apartheid has left gaping wounds that are a long way from being

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