The Brick Walls
Slavery in America ignited a toxic stress crisis for African Americans that matters for black lives today.
What would it take for a person to live in a crawl space?
The likely answer is determination, resilience and a threat scary enough to make this a more appealing alternative.
Harriet Jacobs lived in her grandmother’s attic for seven years to escape an enslaved life — for her and her children — of relentless adversity and abuse.
She was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. Like so many slave children, Harriet endured repeated trauma and activation of her stress response, which includes the amygdala.
In appearance, the amygdala wouldn’t look like more than two tiny almonds in our brain. In function, it can keep us alive during a dangerous situation.
It is part of our limbic system; located deep in the brain’s left and right temporal lobes. The amygdala is a congregation of neurons that trigger our emotional responses to the world around us.
An emotional spectrum that includes fear.
Fear is critical to our survival. When a fearful situation occurs, the amygdala activates our body’s stress response: cortisol is released from the adrenal gland in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), while the adrenal gland in the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary system (SAM) produces adrenaline and noradrenaline. We are now in flight or fight.
This process is remarkably effective; our bodies are now calibrated to survive. Nerve impulses increase heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen intake. Blood vessels and lung bronchioles are dilated so that more oxygen reaches muscles and vital organs. The frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex tends to go offline so our executive capacities don’t get in the way of survival.
This is a simplistic description of a complicated process that is a normal response to stress stimuli. But what happens when the stress is too severe, too frequent and occurs during childhood?
This describes toxic stress which can result in a dysregulated stress response. It is beyond positive or even tolerable stress — which are important to promoting healthy development — and refers to persistent adversity that a child experiences without the buffer of a safe, stable adult or other protective factors.
African Americans are the most at-risk for growing up in toxic stress. 61% of black children have at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (oR ACE). According to Center for Youth Wellness —
Exposure to ACEs, including abuse, neglect, domestic violence and parental mental illness and substance abuse, not only affects brain development, it can change children’s hormonal systems, immune systems and even their DNA. This can cause behavioral problems, learning difficulties, and physical health issues.
Social demographics can determine a child’s exposure to ACEs — especially where race and income intersect — and poverty is often the hotbed of prolonged trauma. The Children’s Defense Fund says that black children are more than three times as likely to be poor than white children, and poverty can have devestating effects on a child’s development.
Parental incarceration is another significant factor when it comes to toxic stress, which is disproportionately high among African American communities.
High concentrations of parental incarceration in a neighborhood can not only diminish the protective capacity of affected families, it can also erode the overall protective capacity of the neighborhood.
This is from Economic Policy Institute which also highlights the toll of intergenerational trauma among low income African Americans.
You’ve probably heard this term — intergenerational trauma — but what about “the brick wall”?
To understand what this means, we have to acknowledge the heavy truth that up until 150 years ago, black people on this continent weren’t considered people.
Before then, their lives existed on paper only as another person’s property. To penetrate the brick wall, black Americans frequently must rely on the names of their ancestors’ owners.
This is from The Washington Post. I propose this isn’t the only brick wall that stands in the way of black Americans today. Another is toxic stress.
As an orphaned slave, twelve-year-old Harriet Jacobs ended up with the Norcom family where she was sexually tormented by Dr. James Norcom. In an attempt to protect and force the sale of her children, Harriet spent her remaining adolescence in a crawl space of her grandmother’s attic.
For seven years, Harriet watched other children play through a peep hole. With incredible resilience, she survived living in hiding and in 1842 Harriet escaped to the north. Harriet became very active in the abolition movement and worked with her daughter to start a school and home for freed slaves in Savannah, Georgia.
It’s a tragic reality that the affects of toxic stress doesn’t stop when the adversity eases. Like Harriet, enslaved people in the United States who escaped or survived to see the end of slavery may have had to live their remaining years with a dysregulated stress response. Because that’s what happens when childhood stress is too severe and too frequent and I can’t imagine a stressor that is more toxic than slavery.
This is a child’s brain on unwavering stress: the amygdala is persistently triggered and becomes overactive; the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus — the memory center of the brain — go offline; and disruption of feedback inhibition (the stress thermostat no longer regulates cortisol release from the SAM and HPA).
I just described what the dysregulation of a stress response can look like on a biological level. But the consequences of toxic stress can be observed as increased risk of health issues and shortened life expectancies. And it doesn’t stop there —
Scientists know how dangerous toxic stress — severe, prolonged or repetitive adversity with a lack of the adequate adult support — is to children because they know how it damages and modifies the DNA in their cells.
This article describes how toxic stress can even alter DNA.
So if we add up all of these factors together, about how the brain responds to chronic stress and fear during childhood, we can see how slavery set in motion generations of black Americans who are more at-risk to ACEs and toxic stress. More oppressive walls go up when we cognize social determinants of health — including poverty and disproportionate incarceration, that are compounded by institutional racism and the cycle of intergenerational trauma.
Only when we acknowledge this epidemic of ACEs among black communities can we begin to kick down and find freedom from the walls of intergenerational toxic stress.
Additional references:
The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity
Nadine Burke Harris
