Out of the Hands of Others’ Fantasies: Minority Mental Health in the Eye of Neoliberalism’s Storm
By: Stillpoint Magazine
Tags: Mental Health, Neoliberalism, Racism

“You are strong. You are built for this,” a trusted colleague told me back in 2012 after we both became tenured professors. After years of repeated exposure to macro and micro-aggressions, from being mistaken for a “car thief” by neighbors residing in my condominium building, to simply living consciously-while-black in our age of civic unrest, I’ve come to realize that the silent strength I so often rely upon to keep upright is not sustainable. In fact, the very idea of silent strength is a potentially harmful illusion; it’s a coping mechanism that can mask a dangerous level of cortisol production on any given day. From objects of gratuitous violence broadcasted in endless circulation on social media platforms to metaphors for untimely death, black bodies in particular are dangerously more public in twenty-first-century U.S than in past eras. Though Stuart Hall reminded us that we are a “media-mediated” people and culture decades ago, critical thinking in relation to social difference is now more crucial than ever.

It’s no secret: People of color suffer disproportionately more from untreated anxiety and mental health disorders than Non-Hispanic whites. In 2018, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), “Over 70% of Black/African American adolescents with a major depressive episode did not receive treatment for their condition.” The SAMHSA also reported that “Asian American adults were less likely to use mental health services than any other racial/ethnic group.” The “model minority” status of Asian Americans, as Anne Cheng notes, encourages them to “sing the praises of the American way” as they suffer the consequences of “embodying both delight and repugnance.” The quest for social inclusion in a historically segregated society so easily catches one up in a web of mixed messages and unacknowledged yet pressing feelings.

This makes it difficult to isolate the roles that internalized racism and hidden, systematic racism play in the production of these mental health disparities. Indeed, garden variety forms of depression emerge out of social fictions that claim the individual in a host of unclaimed ways. However, this is not the classic chicken or the egg causality dilemma. Racism in its neoliberal guise traffics in blackness and, more broadly, social difference in ways that not only secure political, social and economic disenfranchisement adeptly, but also lay the groundwork for potential forms of psychological suffering and damage by way of seemingly benign forces of misrecognition and displacement. The myth of the “damaged black psyche” can take on material forms when the mechanisms of its cultural production — from the circulation of imagery that feeds the psyches of racial conservatives to the stigma related avoidance that plagues people of color — are unacknowledged and left unchecked (Scott).

PACIFIC by artist DEBORAH CHEYENNE CHRUCHON.

Let me explain: In neoliberal political, social, and economic life, individual failures and vulnerabilities are often attributed to things inherent and unchanging in one’s own character, rather than to social, cultural, and political influences and forces. Institutions and the people therein are thereby absolved of the structural application of the oppression they engineer. What is more, the increasingly privatized healthcare, education, and housing systems that characterize the neoliberal state also promote a culture of individualism and individual responsibility that buttresses the culture of racial indifference left over from the Obama era of supposed colorblindness. The image of a people caught “in the eye of the storm” is useful to understand how the fantasies of the dominant society put people of color in unacknowledged, systematically racist situations that lead to negative mental health outcomes, and suffering, in silent perpetuity.

“Look at you,” my colleague requested, “you are a tenured, full professor. You’ve got this!” As she paused, I looked into her eyes and saw the uneven and contradictory scales of the social justice mindset that plague so many in our neoliberal times. Indeed, the myth of my invincibility traffics in the same vein of thought that leaves others who are less privileged and insulated than myself more vulnerable to gratuitous violence and indifference. The persistence of mental health care disparities along racial and class lines despite major advances in institutional equity and inclusion and, moreover, health care advances is a paradox of the most systemic sort. More specifically, while some minorities are caught and entrapped at the hands of the prison industrial complex, others feel the racial wrath of globalization, deindustrialization and impending demographic changes in less acute, yet still formidable ways.

The hallmark of the neoliberal state is the false assumption of a “level playing field” while at the same time it secures upper-class power and the illusion of middle-class mobility at the expense of the common good, and at the expense of the wellbeing of marginalized populations. In recent years, class power and privilege have been co-opted by the nation’s growing elite cohort of individuals from historically marginalized communities. “Model minorities” are often equated falsely with the class, power, and privilege symbolized by the Obamas and Oprah in ways that produce a range of procedural and tactical workplace aggressions. Racial and political tension in the U.S. is higher than it has been in recent decades. And the recent news of Robert F. Smith, a black billionaire, paying off the educational loan debt of the Morehouse College’s graduating class of 2019 — an outstanding act of charity — will only serve to quicken the impulses of white supremacist hate. Certainly, the recent uptick in domestic terrorism is the result of a mixed bag of racialized and class-based backlash from within the more socially conservative segments of the U.S. who are hemorrhaging in the face of the nation’s changing demographics and, moreover, the augmented demographics of the power elite in institutions across the nation.

The myth of the strong, exceptional and indomitable person of color is a cultural production, a notion minorities themselves believe in the name of emotional fortitude as they work to preserve their wellbeing within racially indifferent, or racially hostile, professional and civic contexts. The nuances of the mannerisms and behaviors of people of color are all too often sites of endless surveillance, scrutiny, and commentary in supposedly professional settings. It’s not uncommon for a professional of color to be labeled anything from “regal” (code for arrogant) to “deceptively hostile” within the span of 48 hours. All of this incessant characterization and naming is symptomatic of a people trying desperately to justify and nestle softly into the nation’s moral hypocrisy in relation to social difference.