Mundane Extreme Environmental Stress and African American Families: A Case for Recognizing Different Realities

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND One of the most frequently used statements regarding race issues in America is that of W.E.B. Du Bois (1903), who observed that the most pressing problem facing America in the twentieth century is that of the color line. This quote is so often repeated because the problem of how we perceive, define and negotiate race remains. The color line continues to affect African American families in every aspect of their day-to-day quest to live, work and play. Why is it that in 1998, over two centuries after slavery and almost a century after Du Bois, people of African descent still feel like outcasts in America? The following discussion focuses on this question, offering a theoretical framework which contributes to our better understanding this problem. It also describes the unique stress of African Americans who experience the dilemma of"being Black in White America." The argument is made for the inclusion of this unique stress in both the theory and research on African Americans. Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce describes the environment in which African Americans live as a mundane extreme environment: an environment where racism and subtle oppression are ubiquitous, constant, continuing and mundane. African Americans must daily suffer the annoying "micro-aggressions" such environments breed (Pierce, 1970, 1974), for instance, being ignored for service, assumed to be guilty of anything negative, treated as inferior, stared at because of color, ridiculed because of hair texture, or singled out for being different. We label the stress of living in such an environment as mundane extreme environmental stress (M.E.E.S.): mundane, because this stress is so common, a part of the day-to-day experience of all Blacks that it is almost taken for granted; extreme, because it has a harsh impact on the psyche and world view of Blacks (e.g., self-perception, behavior, interactions); environmental, because it is environmentally induced and fostered; stress, because the ultimate impact on African Americans and their families is indeed stressful, detracting and energy-consuming. History reveals the atrocities and inhumane treatment of slavery and the subsequent devastation of institutional, scientific (Hilliard, 1974, 1985), and personal racism, leading to continued inequities between African Americans and other Americans (Garwood, 1992). The foundation of mundane extreme environmental stress is rooted in this past and present. Many historians, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have written profound and descriptive accounts of the "peculiar institution" and aftermath (America, 1990; Genovese, 1979; Drake, 1945; Stamp, 1956; Woodson, 1933). Understanding the environment in which African Americans must raise their children is critical to understanding the M.E.E.S. with which every African American must contend. RACISM: THE FOUNDATION FOR M.E.E.S. The history of the treatment, perceptions and images of African Americans has led to the incubation and full development of the M.E.E.S. factor in each and every aspect of life for Black America. Jewell Handy Gresham ( 1989) provides a succinct link between early accounts of how African Americans were viewed by the "powers that be" and those that are perpetrated today. The author was struck by the consistency of the message portraying African Americans as pathological and further how data were (and still are) manipulatedand in some cases fabricated-to fuel the fires of racism. Dr. Gresham points out the following: In 1844 Secretary of State John Calhoun stated in a letter that where Blacks and Whites existed in the same society, slavery was the natural result. Wherever the state changed that providential relationship, the Blacks invariably degenerated "into vice and pauperism accompanied by bodily and mental afflictions incident thereto deafness, blindness, insanity and idiocy." In slave states, in contrast, the Black improved greatly "in number, comfort, intelligence and morals. …