In Black America; Dr. Alvin Poussaint; Part 2

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is in Black America. I think that they were interested at the time. I kind of had a reputation as a psychiatrist, but I think it was after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 4, 1968, and they were going to open the school up. Now much more to minority students, African American students, Latino students, and I had no faculty over there who understood anything about working with these students or what the issues would be. The chairman told me he particularly was interested in me because I had recently returned from Mississippi and was doing civil rights and so he kind of knew he was right about that

that I would not be intimidated. Dr. Alvin F. Puson, MD, professor of Psychiatry at Jet Baker's Children's Center, and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and co-author with Bill Cosby up, come on people. Dr. Busson was born in East Harlem, New York, the next to last of eight children. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a printer. His advice is on a wide range of topics including child rearing, the new challenges faced by African American families, and the effect of racism on African American and African American men and boys in particular. Dr. Busson had acted in consulting to the media on a wide range of social issues, concerned with media images and issues regarding the needs of children and the changing family. In the 1980s, Dr. Busson convinced Bill Cosby that TV's first African American position needed to laugh with his children not at them.

The conference show went under to come on a most successful situation comedy on television. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. In this week's program, Dr. Alvin F. Pusson, MD, part two in Black America. I think it's important for us, for African Americans and other groups to be aware of the kind of problems they have and to examine why we have them, how much responsibility we have in solving them, even if we have been victimized and how to take the high road. And also not to hide from them, like set up a wall of silence because you're never going to solve them. If people are going to be denied or get angry that you talk about the fact that black men in particular are so violent and are responsible for close to half of the homicides in the country and 94% of the people they kill are black.

So we're being severely damaged by that and we decide we're not going to talk about that. Then who is to talk about it? Dr. Busson is one of the country's top authorities on subjects from stress and interpersonal communication for multiculturalism to family dynamics. He's an expert on dynamics of race and ethnic relations in this country, increasingly multicultural society and a strong proponent on non-violent parenting and parenting education. In recent years, he has stirred controversy, becoming the first noted psychiatrist to lobby for racism to be declared a mental illness. From 1965 to 1967, he was Southern Field Director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi, providing medical care to civil rights workers and aiding in a desegregation of hospitals and health facilities throughout the South. In 1969, he joined Harvard University from 1975 to 1978. He was Director of Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School, perhaps best known as the

Scrip Consultant, the two of the most popular and groundbreaking television programs, the Cosby Show and a Different World. Throughout his career, he has consistently broken new ground in the fight for equal health and racial injustice. On this week's program, we conclude our conversation with Dr. Alvin F. Prussant, MD. I think that they were interested at the time, I kind of had a reputation as a psychiatrist, but I think it was after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 4, 1968. They were going to open the school up, now much more to minority students, African American students, Latino students, and they had no faculty over there who understood anything about working with these students or what the issues would be. The chairman told me he particularly was interested in me because I had recently returned from Mississippi and was doing civil rights and so he kind of knew and he was right about that

that I would not be intimidated by all of these distinguished and some of them not too sympathetic white faculty. That was true because when I was down in Mississippi dealing with doctors and so on who was straight out, including psychiatrists, straight out was segregationist, and I had to go up against them and say, well, we're going to come after you and you're going to segregate that hospital and we're going to go to Washington and then you were making things like that happen despite the opposition that I was in a place where I knew what needed to be done and what was right and I would not let these people intimidate me in the past, I think I would have let them intimidate me, you know, all you powerful people and brilliant and so on and like back off or not push for the things that I felt were needed to help a lot

of these students just and adapt to Harvard and to be successful and they adapted and were successful and are doing all kinds of mighty things throughout the country in medicine and in fact many of them are dedicating their careers to helping African-American patients, the Latino patients, Native American patients and we desperately need that, we still need that. Through Director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker Center, Children's Center in Boston, Harvey Humphrey Baker, the Honorable Harvey Humphrey Baker, obviously had to be a visionary back in 1970. Well, Baker was a judge, Judge Baker and he got many juveniles coming before the court for delinquency and so on and he had, he was smart enough to understand and appreciate that some of them came from very difficult emotional situations and that they were acting

out behavior because people weren't taking good care of them, you know, all the things we still see today and he felt that a lot of them didn't need, not a lot of them needed help, not just jail or confinement. So he helped to sponsor and support social workers and others who were trying to help these kids emotionally to get on the right track and to provide that help to the young people and also to their families, if the family was part of the problem and so that established a Judge Baker Children's Center and it's kind of gone through different cycles in terms of what they do but they have a school there for special needs children and they do research on cycle therapy, the Media Center was set up because I'm a strong believer that the Media has profound effects on children in particular, what they watch and on people in general and I began to feel strongly that way after my involvement with the Cosby

Show for eight years as the script consultant, I saw the impact of that show on society and on the world, it over 20 countries was showing the Cosby Show on television with dubbed in different languages around the globe, depending on the country. And so I understood that and I've worked with, I was a script consultant for a different world. I saw the impact of that and for other shows, Fatherhood, Little Bill, he and I just a lot of them and felt that, I also felt that I could use the media for my mission. If I was going to change people's attitudes and so on, I could do it through the media, the media reaches a lot of people. So and I made the same decision around my writing. So at first, when Ebony would call and ask me for an article, I would say, I'm a professor, I'm supposed to be writing for Ebony magazine.

And then I said, if you're going to communicate with people and the people you want to reach, you have to write for Ebony. And you have to be taught to reporters at Jet Magazine. And you have to write for essence. You have to do that if you want to reach people. And it was always thrilled me when I wrote an article for Ebony on something and then I would be at some black expose and go to some community function on some other city. And you know, Jew brothers would come up to me, you know, bopping up and down and say, you know, you doctor Prusson, you're the one who wrote and said, so and so and so and so and Ebony, well, you know, I don't agree with you. And I would say, it's worth it. If I'm reaching those guys, that is worth it. You are stirring up debate among these guys because they're picking up Ebony from the

coffee table in the house, even if they're living in public housing. And they're reading those stories because they were written on a level that they could understand them. No big words, simple language, straightforward with some pictures in it. And so I think doing that is an important, I felt that too in books that I wrote, a lot of them, but directed toward ordinary people. One should be for ordinary people, lay my burden down about African-American mental health, but actually it's a lot of people find it much too heavy to read. So that one is being read mostly by social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists, but the other ones like raising black children is read by mothers and fathers and come on people as being read by regular folk too. Yeah, I wanted to come to that since we were talking about your writing.

You co-authored that book with Bill Cosby. That came out of statements that Mr. Cosby made in 2004, and then you all went around the country holding town meetings to have some solutions to some of the statements in which he made. Why is that important for African-Americans or for any American to read about the problems, social eels, directly towards minorities, but there's also other hand minorities need to take some ownership of what's going on. Well, I think it's important for us, for African-Americans and other groups to be aware of the kind of problems they have and to examine why we have them, how much responsibility we have in solving them even if we have been victimized and how to take the high road and also not to hide from them like set up a wall of silence because you're never going to solve them.

If people are going to be denied or get angry that you talk about the fact that black men in particular are so violent and are responsible for close to half of the homicides in the country, and 94 percent of the people they kill are black. So we're being severely damaged by that and we decide we're not going to talk about that, then who is to talk about it? And so some people say, well, don't talk about those things because you're airing dirty laundry and perpetuating stereotypes. You don't need to be us talking about them, anything we talk about, white people know already. They know we kill each other. You know? They read it in newspaper. They see it on television and maybe they exploit it. But we have a big strong image of committing homicides and the statistics come out in the newspapers and all around. They know those things.

This is also true. We felt that we had to get people to face some of the things they were doing, even in the mistreatment of children, see that that's not talked about. You know, people don't want to talk about what they hear that these mothers calling their kids in a supermarket and slapping them upside the head and using the N word and the F word and everything under the sun to the three-year-old kid. Well, if you don't say, listen, this is happening. What are we going to do about it, then it's kind of denial. And so we felt that we would talk about these problems, but not in a way to like point the finger as much as say, what is it that we need to do to solve these problems? So the issues are posed. For instance, the violence rate, so we pose a question, is beating your kids a lot, one of the problems in terms of violence in the community. Are we raising violent kids because we're being violent toward them? We know there's a connection between violent kids and child abuse and neglect.

We have a high rate of child abuse and neglect. We know that kids are more violent when they're psychologically abused. We know that a lot of black men, most of them, 80, 90 percent of them, infallible in crimes, you take their history and they have a history of child abuse and neglect. And so then you have, once you get those connections, you have to talk about parenting. What is it that we do or we need to do for our children? Are we not pricing them in the way that we should and giving them what they need to succeed? Black parents will say, any black parent will say they want their kids to get an education. Well, what are they doing to help that? Some of them don't care about the school, they're not involved in the school. But even before that, many of them don't reach to their children. That is books and so on and so on. That's the way children begin to lay down the foundation for learning.

And so some of them may not know they're supposed to reach to the children and a lot of them don't know they're supposed to reach to the children. So information like that is in the book Come On People. And it's subtitle of the book is Come On People on a Path from Victims to Victors. And we title it that because we feel that a lot of people in the black community have felt hopeless and helpless and see themselves as victims. And we'll get into, well, I can't graduate from high school, the man won't let me get anywhere. And all I kind of talk, and that's not true frequently, that they're using that as an excuse to not take the high road and to succumb to like destructive street life, particularly if they think they can make a quick buck. And so we feel that those behaviors, in turn, weaken the whole black community and takes away the hope and the trust we should have for each other. So we wanted to spark debate, but we also wanted to inspire.

And when Codsby mostly went around a country holding these town meetings, we have all those amazing stories in the book where people were hit rock bottom with drugs, jail, everything else. And another disturbing thing was I don't think black people knew how many black people are in jail. Black men in jail. I mean, we make up about 40 to 45% of the jail population. In the country, I don't think people knew that because when we said it at different places, they would say, what? And you say, well, close to 1 million black men are in jail right now. What? And then you have to look, well, what does that do to the community? And they return the reentry programs very few. What does that do to the family? What does it do to the children of those inmates, a lot of them are fathers, you know, how do we get a handle on some of that? How can parents and a community protect the children from going to jail?

Now we know from the statistics we gathered that, you know, 80% of jail inmates are high school job outs. So then you go from there and you say, well, in a lot of urban areas, the job outrate from high school for African-Americans is close to 50%, 50% and among black males it's higher. And some cities like 75%, 75% don't graduate high school, well, that's a nice ticket into jail when that happens. So that if you, if one thing you say you could do well, you know, if all of you parents and everybody else just got behind and the school is getting these kids to graduate from high school, it's protective against going to jail. So we were like looking for solutions but also saying there's hope because you could hear the stories of the people who thought it was all over for them.

They were junkies, they were this, they were in for shooting somebody and so on and came out and many of them got up and testified. The fact that they could, they still turn their life around and that we felt those stories were very important for people to hear who are in less difficult circumstances to see the opportunities that are there rather than to focus on like the negative, we can't do it and people have stopped me from doing it and getting kind of accentuating the positive even when times are hard because Bill and I feel like a lot of people that the history of black Americans from slavery on right up to now has been succeeding against the odds. You don't now succumb and say, oh, things are so bad now and listen to the gangster rap is saying, oh, the things are so bad when that we can't succeed, well, our grandparents

and our parents succeeded when things were much worse than they are now. Even though there's still institutional racism, I won't deny that. There's still systemic racism and you look at any, you know, when I say that, like we have all those statistics in the book, the black unemployment rate is always twice the white rate. I mean, it's been that way for decades and when the subprime mortgage people went out to exploit people, they picked on African Americans and Latinos. So there's still people praying, we still have to deal with them and there's still police brutality, there's still excessive use of excessive force on blacks, much more likely. There's still racial profiling. That isn't, hasn't gone away, it's still there, but we're saying despite those things, you have to still work to succeed. Not to succumb to, well, I can't do it because the cops just stopped me because I was black on my car, you know, and then I think even in fighting institutional racism, the stronger

you are as a person and as a people, the more effective you will be. Dr. Rosalind, couple of more questions. During my generation, and I don't know doing yours, mental health and talking to psychiatrists was taboo or something that African Americans didn't talk about or maybe didn't participate in that mental health process. That's part number one of the questions. Part two, how do we get young people to come and speak openly about their feelings to a person such as yourself? It's very hard for young people of any color teenagers to speak to psychiatrists and social work. Sometimes, they are more ready to talk to people who are in the same situation and that's why there's been a lot of experimental programs around peer counseling and so on. And frequently you can get other inmates, Malcolm X being an example of that, who can reach other inmates once they turn on a positive road.

And you have to use all of those resources. Sometimes people say, well, you know, there's such a distance between the black middle class and low income youth. I've seen a lot of wonderful mentoring relationships between middle class black men or just black men and teenagers from low income communities. That work if you want to do it. So I think sometimes being kind of pessimistic about what we can do isn't legitimate. And a lot of these mentoring programs, I think, make a difference to a lot of young people who don't have adult supervision or adults in their lives of people they can bond with or people they feel care about them. And a lot of our young people feel that people don't care about them. Sometimes they feel the parents don't care about them and when fathers on around the absentee father thing that Obama spoke to it too and we got all over the book and come on people is important because when the fathers on around a lot of the kids feel abandoned by those

fathers and when they feel abandoned by the fathers they feel depressed. They feel unloved and then many of them feel angry. And then that anger simmers in the black community. I mean when you have a lot of killing and violence there's a lot of anger. And so one basic question, where's all the anger coming from? Why are black youth so angry that they will blow someone away in a minute? And then you have to look at the community. You just can't say it's racism out there doing that because people are the way they are from what's going around them and the interactions they have with other people. Not from the abstract. Speaking of the media we have three movies out particularly directed towards African Americans. Seven pounds with Will Smith not easily broken with Morris Chestnut. And then last night my son and I went to see notorious.

Are we sitting out different signals or were just become one of that multicultural melting pot with the messages that we send each each each each one. And I think like anything blacks probably haven't on where they should be in terms of entertaining movie but they have certainly come much further. So you have some of the biggest stars actors are African American that are pulling in the bucks to these movies Will Smith and Denzel Washington. And actors by the very nature play a variety of roles and sometimes they pick roles that are not so you know that you don't think are very admirable. And then sometimes the times they pick roles that are fantastic you know. So that's I could say that about nearly every one of them. And so but we are getting the roles and parts and one thing that Holly would always like is if you bring them in money they will set aside some of their belief systems.

So if they as they see these stars become successful then they're more open to other stars coming in and being successful in the same way that Obama being president of the United States. I'm going to make a lot of these corporations and other institutions feel comfortable with blacks and leaderships since the ultimate leadership in the country is held by an African America. Tuesday after this conversation Obama will be sworn in as to 44th president of the United States. Being a member of that the civil rights movement did you ever suspect this day would happen in your lifetime? No I didn't I don't think many people did I in fact I have been talked to a person a black person who thought it would well no matter what the age I knew it would happen some day but I didn't think it would happen in my lifetime I didn't think it would happen so quickly you know after all you when you look at the the the routes for becoming a presidential candidate you have to be a senator or something you have to be a governor or some and we have

very few of those. So he he was the only black man in the senate black person Mosley Brown was a senator prior to him yeah yeah and so here's the one and he makes it all the way to the presidency. So that's a long shot and he came in as a long shot when I first heard him declare to run for the denomination I said well you know good luck and it was very hard for me to imagine how he thought he was going to beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination so there's something a bit miraculous about what happened and all the things around it and the economy and so on but also his skill the guy had a lot of skill if you think I mean I thought for sure he was finished after Reverend Wright stuff and he pulled out of it I mean so he's got a lot of ability a lot of good sense and with because of his personality his oratory

has won not just the confidence of the African American was there I mean he's got nearly all African but of white Americans Latino American Americans and so on because over time they got to respect him. Dr. Alvin F Puson MD professor of psychiatry at Jupp Baker's Children's Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston and co-author with Bill Cosby up come on people if you have questions comments or suggestions ask your future in black America programs write us also let us know what radio station you heard is over the views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin you can hear previous programs online at kut.org until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez I'm John L. Hanson Jr. thank you for joining us today please join us again next week.

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