Combating fatalism in the black community

From the Christian Science Monitor: Combating fatalism in the black community

In some ways, these cycles of violence that cloud so many of our communities have become ordinary details of daily life. But that hasn't stopped it from affecting our collective mental health, the black male psyche especially. Suicides are on the rise among young black men.

Ending their own lives seems to have become a common solution for young black men wandering through the maze of thug life, alcoholism, and drug addiction. According to a report from the US Surgeon General's office, suicide is the third leading cause of death for African-American males between the ages of 15 and 24. These and other pathologies seem to be consuming the friends and relatives with whom I grew up.

While I don't personally know anyone who has committed suicide by putting a gun to his head, I bear witness to a slower form of it each time that I am home.

…..

Man, my life is over," one friend told me recently, believing that his conviction on drug charges eliminates college as a future option.

Like other friends, he, too, was filled with questions and was short on answers.

While we may all be searching for a way out of this mess, what is becoming apparent is that the answer does not lie with the use of drugs, alcohol, or guns; that the answer is not to bury our heads in the sand or to keep treating the issue of mental health in the black community as taboo; that part of the answer, at least for me, is gravitating toward life, toward hope, toward education.

"Man, I'm looking for a job," my friend told me during my recent visit home when his nephew had shown me his home-monitoring anklet. "But ain't nobody trying to hire me."