Let me speak very directly to this whole notion of what it is and what it isn't and how I arrived at it. As a social scientist one of the first things that I noticed was just the behavior towards the title...."Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome." There's just a visceral response in America when you say "the slave" is attached to anything. Those of you that are more familiar know that what I'm looking at is multi-generational trauma. Multi-generational trauma's not a new phenomenon. We've looked at other groups. We've looked at aboriginal folks in Australia, we've looked at indigenous natives, you know, we've looked at victims of holocaust. Why don't we get the push back there?

So you see, this is symptomology, this is speaking to a bigger problem, it's a pathology associated with race in America. Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues, so we have to tell the truth and we have to in turn, tell the children the truth. So the first truth is: the majority of the world is a world of color, this is undeniable.

So as we look at who we are I think this becomes very important as a foundation piece: your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values and your values become your destiny and of course Ghandi is the one who said that. And it's so true, because there's a statement that says as we arrive at our self-construct, it says that "I am not who I think I am. And I am not who you think I am. I am who I think, that you think, that I am."

So it becomes very important to find out what those people believe about who they are and hence who you are. This is taken from James Gilligan who is a psychiatrist who worked 25 years is prisons and essentially what James Gilligan asserted in his book on violence is that, it is the destruction of the culture that destroys the person. That it is as intrinsic as food is to the body as nourishment for the person, the human, the psyche. That is what he said after working with hardened murderers and rapists he said, what we have done in this country is we have deprived them of their sense of who they are.

Racism is a system of advantage based on race and so what becomes important as we look at slavery, again, the second retort in terms of the pushback is: "well you know Joy, slavery is not a new institution. Lots of people had slaves, you know...the Romans had slaves....you know so, what's the big deal?" Well American chattel slavery was very, very different from most forms that preceded it. It differed in the way in which a person became a slave, the length of servitude, the treatment of slaves and most importantly, the way owners viewed them.

Before the European slave trade began, most people who had became slaves became so as a result of war. Two societies went to war, winners enslaved the losers. That's not what American chattel slavery was based on. It was based on the notion of Aristotle: "the natural slave." And it was believed that Black people were somehow less human so now we're talking about dehumanization. And suggesting that never will you rise to the level of those who enslaved you. Whereas in other societies people became absorbed within that society, eventually married and found freedom. That was never to occur with people of African descent.

I often talk about the foundation of our problems around race is based on cognitive dissonance. So the first thing that we have to understand was how could a people who deem themselves superior, moral, dignified, intelligent, civilized......engage in behaviors that are the antithesis of that. Because what we know about cognitive dissonance is that it doesn't settle well inside a person. So then how could a people, oppress and subjugate another group of people using the incorrect history that we have for 246 years, what 1619 the date that we were given for the ratification of the 13th amendment.

We're talking about 246 years. How do you reconcile oppressing people for that long? Well here's a recipe: if ever you are to remove the dissonance, which you must do in order to function, the first thing you must do, number one, is justify your behavior. Number two is that you then have to relabel the people to justify your behavior, to fit the behavior towards them. So the very first fundamental contradiction was the constitution. The whole notion of democracy and freedom and at the same time having people enslaved and the absolute genocide of native people. How do you reconcile that? Be clear that in order for these years of subjugation, centuries of subjugation to occur, you had to have institutions that were complicit.

Those of you that know what post traumatic stress disorder is....post traumatic stress disorder, is a disorder that occurs as the result of a single trauma. What we have to consider is, looking at that one singular event....we're not talking about one event, we're talking about a lifetime of trauma. It's not plausible that Black people escaped without that diagnosis. Now what are the symptoms? Think about this: exaggerated startle response, outbursts of anger, feeling of foreshortened future.

Now start thinking about what has been folded in as cultural behavior: "What?! What you lookin' at?!" You start thinking about what is now adaptive social learning that has been transmitted because I may not have been broken but if my mama was broken, I didn't know her behavior was broken behavior. And there was nobody to come in and help treat us during slavery or after. Jim Crow was after slavery, the whole Klan was after slavery. Let's do the math: 246 years of trauma, no help, freed, no help, more trauma....we're amazing!

But the bottom line is we gotta do this work. I believe that this is not an individual heal, this is really a group heal. I think for this country to heal, we all have to get involved in this. Every single person. Because all of us have been affected and infected by this thing. But it's still doable because remember, we have Ancestors whose shoulders we're standing on who saw 100 years of slavery behind them and 100 years in front of them and still joy came in the morning. So we can do this thing, we can do this thing.

I read this parable, actually this proverb when I was in Africa and it says: "if you wish to go fast, go alone, but if you wish to go far, go together" and THAT is the notion of village. We have to engage, we have to become village again! We have to become community, you know? And I know that if we came this far, with no help, really....nobodies gonna tell me we don't have everything we need to move beyond this.

When I went to Africa, I was traveling with 8 other African-American women, I often tell this story because it was really the transformation for me, in my work on Post Traumatic. This woman, she's walking towards me and she grabs me by the hand and she says: "I am from Lesotho. Lesotho is my home. If I leave Lesotho, Lesotho is still my home. Did you think we would forget you? We mourned Martin and we mourned Malcolm right there with you. You are African, 300 years from home. We just wondered, when you were coming back."

Let the healing begin. Thank you so much.