On Sunday, April 29, I was the Keynote Speaker for the Annual Scholarship Brunch sponsored by the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
I spoke about having the Audacity to Grieve. This topic is important to me because it is imperative that we develop culturally responsive interventions that are grounded in the sociocultural experiences of African Americans in order to support them as the struggle to cope with the homicide of a loved one.
My main talking points were:
- African Americans experience homicide violence, community violence, and state sanctioned police violence at higher rates than any other racial group in the United States.
- The majority of homicide victims are African American males between the ages of 15-44.
- African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, and yet they account for more than half of homicide victims.
- African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, and yet they account for more than half of homicide victims.
- Research suggest that each homicide victim has at least 7-10 family members faced with the challenge of learning how to cope with the murder of their loved one.
- As a result of this overrepresentation we are dealing with an epidemic that disproportionately impacts some of our most vulnerable.
- African American survivors of homicide victims experience what we often refer to as disenfranchised grief: Grief that is not acknowledged by society as a whole and as a result of this dismissal forces survivors to rely upon their own select set of copings strategies, such as Spiritual Coping and Meaning Making, Maintaining a Connection to the Deceased, Collective Coping and Caring for Others, and Concealment (Sharpe, 2015).
- Grieving African American survivors of homicide victims, community violence and state sanctioned police violence often find themselves taking bold risks in their efforts to cope with such tragedies. In this context, the audacity to grieve is often actualized in the form of political protests, anger and disillusionment in systems responsible for the provision of legal, mental and medical care services. The tragic irony is that for African Americans, the audacity to be fearless as one grieves, courageous as one grieves, and yes, angry as one grieves is not often met with the same level of support and understanding as we have seen displayed for other populations.
- Social work professionals have an opportunity and responsibility to shift this paradigm:
- We must develop culturally responsive interventions for survivors of homicide victims.
- We must train law enforcement, the faith based community, and mental and medical health services professionals on ways to engage, support and understand the experiences of African American survivors of homicide victims.
- We must challenge ourselves to have very candid conversations about racism, implicit bias and their continued impact not just on the lives of African American survivors of violence, but on our professions' AUDACITY to be culturally responsive social justice agents for change.