As a thirty-four year old woman surviving post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of childhood abuse, I had an agonizing response to the way the media chose to cover the Baltimore Uprising and depict Baltimore's defiant youth. At first, we didn't really know what started it all. It was only after the dust started to settle that we learned that school kids were removed from school buses and were stranded in the streets by police officers. We also learned that before the riots started, bystanders and business owners were hurling objects and insults at peaceful protesters. Some were even driving cars into the crowds, none of whom were arrested. Images even emerged of police officers armed in riot gear throwing bricks back into the crowds of teenagers. But even before the dust started to settle, I knew to wait for more information before forming any strong opinions about what was going on in Baltimore. I knew this because, although I am not Black, have never been targeted by police officers, and have never been in the midst of a riot, I am a misunderstood and marginalized member of society. As someone who spoke up against authority figures seeking justice for the sexual abuse I had endured, I know that when a victim fights for justice against abusive authority figures, the victim quickly becomes society’s villain. The defiant youth were labeled “thugs” as I had been labeled “crazy” many times in my life. So the moments in which the Fox news, CNN, and even our president decided to refer to Baltimore’s defiant and oppressed youth as “thugs” and “criminals” I knew there was much more to the story than what was being presented. Due to the events of my own life, I also knew that I would stand in support of the defiant ones.
When I was five years old my mother married a man who everyone adored. We’ll call him Mike. At this time we also became a part of a fundamental Baptist church as per my stepfather’s wishes. I was six years old when I decided to accept Jesus as my savior. In our church we called that “getting saved.” My siblings and I quickly started calling Mike “Dad” because we loved him so much. He also called us his kids. He would take us and our other friends from the neighborhood on outings to the beach, to ice-cream shops, and the like. Having had grown up poor and with other poor kids, Mike was like a superhero to us. He also held daily “prayer time” at home during which we would all take turns reading the Bible and praying for each other.
When I was teenager, we moved out of the inner-city and into the suburbs and became members of the one of the nearby evangelical churches in our new neighborhood. I obeyed the rules of my church, took a vow of chastity, and even taught Sunday school to the younger kids. I was often told how beautiful my family was. I was also often told how great Mike was for raising someone else’s kids as if we were his own. What a lot of people didn’t know was that Mike was a pedophile who molested me and my siblings for years, along with at least two other kids from our community. He also had a horrific temper and controlled my mother, my siblings, and me through violent threats and violent acts. Despite all of the obvious signs, Mike’s popularity always outweighed everyone else’s common sense and judgement. My abuser was held on a pedestal, was given spiritual leadership, and I was expected to be both respectful and grateful for all he had done for us.
Two factors controlled my life, my parents and my church. They were my whole world and the ultimate authority in my life. My parents were strict and my Evangelical Christian church laid down the laws of life for us. Yet, when I was nineteen years old I fell in love and betrayed my chastity vows. My first consensual sexual experience somehow triggered a flood of repressed memories of the sexual and physical abuse I had experienced. As my world shattered to pieces, people kept telling me that I was acting “crazy.” This was the beginning of my career as a mentally ill person. As the walls of the denial of what happened to me continued to collapse I started to confront my family and church about the sexual abuse. Much to my dismay, no one would take my side. My pastor told me that if my stepfather had done something wrong, it was time for me to forgive and move on because he supposedly repented. I was even told by one church member that I had the “spirit of insanity.” In the meanwhile, I had to see Mike interacting with the young kids in my family. I saw him volunteering for the Vacation Bible School geared towards grammar school aged children at church. One time I even saw Mike lead one of the neighbor kids into his car supposedly to take her to Vacation Bible School. I followed him and took her by the hand back to her home and told her family about what Mike had done to me.
The neighbor kid’s family sold their house and moved away. My own mother blamed me and fell to her knees weeping that I was ruining the family’s name. My pastor felt sorry for her and admonished me for my selfishness. Her best friend even confronted me to tell me that I was destroying her life and that I needed to stop. Child Protective Services said there was nothing they could do without substantial evidence. The one thing nobody in my life seemed to be able to understand was that I was not picking fights with everyone around me, all of my authority figures, and the people who sustained my life, because I was just angry and wanted to punish everyone. These were not random crazy temper tantrums. Rather, I was scared that there would be more and more victims like me and I wanted to stop that from happening. I had no way of knowing how many victims there had been and how many there would be. I was screaming, shouting, and making a scene. But I needed to be heard and nobody would listen when I was being polite. But how could my rage be worse than what it was that I was actually fighting against? But in the eyes of everyone around me, I was the problem and I was the one who needed to be suppressed. I fought this battle with my family and my church for several years until I finally had a complete mental breakdown and was hospitalized for a week in a psychiatric hospital.
Upon my discharge, one of my sisters even cried to me on the way home. It seemed that she was devastated that I told the hospital staff about what Mike had done to us. It seemed that I was smearing the reputation of a repentant and innocent man. It also seemed that she and my mother were very concerned about how many people I would tell because they wanted to be able to save face as they hosted their elaborate prayer meetings. And so, as drugged up on psychotropic medication as humanly possible, I had to find a job and support myself and somehow live a life knowing that a predator was on the loose, he had a tremendous amount of support which I didn't have, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Throughout the last fifteen years of mental instability, mental breakdowns, severe relapses, alcohol abuse, periods of unemployment, and more recent stretches of better times, I have been hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals a total of four times. During my second hospitalization, I didn't even sit with a counselor one time before I was drugged up and released. During my third hospitalization, the doctor didn't spend more than a few minutes with me and wouldn't listen when I told her that the drugs she prescribed me were making me feel crazy. I pleaded with her for something else but she wouldn't listen. There were absolutely no activities for us to engage in, nor any sessions with a therapist or a counselor. The hospital staff was even letting the inpatients watch horror movies in the only common room. The images and sounds from the scary movies combined with the effects of the medication and my existing mental disorder, had pushed my anxiety to such a high level that I thought I was going to completely lose my mind. But I had to be in the room with the TV because if it appeared that I was retreating by myself and not socializing, the psychiatrist said she wouldn't send me home. Not once did even one hospital staff ever stop to ask me about the circumstances that led me there. During my fourth hospitalization, I had already moved away from the east coast and to the Midwest by myself and was maintaining a responsible job in IT. This time the hospital staff took good care of me except for the psychiatrist. When I told her that I wound up there due to my anxiety after hearing that my parents were now running their own church in their basement and I was afraid for my life as a result of calling the police on them, she didn't believe me. She accused me of being in a psychotic delusion. I had to retract what I told her in order to be discharged. Luckily, a social worker in the hospital who believed me was able to get in touch with my other sister who backed up every part of my story. Although this sister and I had processed what had happened to us at different paces, through different routes, with different triggers, and miles apart, we had finally come to the same conclusion and she certainly had my back that day. But by then it was the weekend which meant no one gets discharged. Finally, after spending Christmas Eve and Christmas in the psychiatric hospital, and after the weekend passed, I was discharged on New Year’s Eve. I was then hit with multiple bills summing up to thousands of dollars nickel and diming me for each night I stayed in the hospital. I had no choice but to pay it. The next two Christmases, Christmas 2013 and Christmas 2014, I spent alone.
But to this day, I still haven’t been able to provide any substantial evidence to CPS or the police, nor have I been able to get through to the rest of my family or community. There have been no investigations and no retributions. My mother is still married to the man who molested me. And I am still on the outside while he maintains his glory as a man of God. I have suffered greatly for speaking up and fighting back. I have received no justice and don’t know that I ever will.
What always amazes me about America’s reaction to violent uprisings within our shores is that many seem to think that the violence executed by defiant citizens is somehow so much worse than the initial violence executed against them. Somehow countless torture murders of unarmed Black citizens is not viewed with the same severity of contempt as broken windows and minor injuries. A CVS was torched down. The CVS can rebuild or take its poverty wages elsewhere. Either way, CVS will be just fine. Freddie Gray won’t. Nor will the masses of Baltimore citizens who are tortured, abused, killed, and mass incarcerated on a routine basis.
I know what it is to be cornered by violent and abusive authority figures with nowhere to run or hide. My heart was torn apart when the news broke about how Baltimore police forced youth out of school buses and stranded them on the street. I wanted to scream as I viewed footage of Baltimore police officers surrounding and taunting innocent kids leaving them with no way out. And I wept when I heard my president call them “thugs.” As far as I am concerned, they had every right to fight back. Granted, the destruction was great, but they were not breaking spines or killing people. They were not engaging in systemic racism and corruption as are their oppressors. Nor did they engage in an act of collective animalistic rage. Rather, they committed an act of anarchy through blatant defiance against the same racist structure and corrupt law enforcement systems that are executing deadly and life destroying violence against them with little to no consequences. I don’t make these statements to encourage or endorse violence. I myself am a peaceful person. However, it is important to keep in mind that the young teenagers were under a calculated attack. The violence of the defiant youth was not even a scratch in the surface compared to the violence and destruction implemented by police officers, judges, prison owners, prosecutors, and politicians against them every day. But as was with me, the authority figures who stand to be the beneficiaries of the oppression against them demonized the victim with such ease. Since they hold positions of authority, much of society doesn't even question this depiction. The victim is portrayed as the villain allowing the corruption and abuse to continue.
There are many lies that surround this portrayal. Many say, “but they are destroying their own communities!” In reality, these are communities that became impoverished through collapse of industry. These are neighborhoods that offer little by means of educational and employment opportunities. These are neighborhoods that people of color were forced into through segregation and out of no choice of their own. These are neighborhoods that don’t necessarily provide the resources for individuals to find their way out. These are areas that the greatest employment opportunity may be through the criminalized drug trade. These are areas then that police officers meeting quotas aggressively patrol and mass arrest youth and adults mainly for nonviolent drug related crimes, tearing their families apart. Prisoners then face juries who often don’t require much more than an officer’s testimony to convict a person of color. Then these nonviolent convicts are given unreasonably high sentences by judges to be trapped in private prisons in which they are charged for every phone call, every meal, and any other “service” they may receive. Owners of privatized prisons get rich off of their human inventory and continue to provide “campaign funding” to the politicians who keep this system going. Just as African slaves were first brought to this country by colonists who were seeking cheap human labor to increase profits for the British, the majority Black prisoners in American prisons are still being forced into the position of human inventory to increase profit for rich white men. Law enforcement is still at the forefront of this oppression. Then, prisoners are eventually released and sent back to their “communities” that still offer little in educational and employment opportunities. But if hipsters come along and decide to open up coffee shops, the “community” is then gentrified and forced to migrate to yet another more impoverished and devastated neighborhood. The defiant youth no more destroyed their “own communities” than I defied a true house of God.
And still more say, “…but violence doesn't accomplish anything.” These are the same individuals who celebrate the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution. These are yet even the same individuals who are beneficiaries of the violence executed against the Black community. The truth is that violence accomplishes a lot. America’s wealth was born and has been sustained by America’s genocides. And just as slave owners of the past had responded to violent slave revolts, current government officials and law enforcement systems demand that the Black community respond to the violence inflicted upon them through nothing but the most peaceful methods in full compliance to the same racist structures that keep them oppressed in the first place. Don’t attack business, don’t impact the economy, because the bottom line is still profits.
On a smaller scale, my tiny little church with a small congregation found itself in need of tides and offerings from every family in membership. For such a community to exist, couples have to stay married. Women have to submit so as not to drive their husbands away. Husbands and wives must forgive each other and believe that divorce is a horrible sin. The nuclear family must stay intact at almost any cost so that the community stays intact. The community stays intact and thus the congregation stays intact and the church survives. Abuse of every form may be dealt with internally with the assumption that “repentance” is enough lest the church fall apart. Thus, religious institutions often become safe havens for abusers. In the meanwhile, religious authority figures who cover over and allow such abuses condemn people like me for speaking out, speaking against, and not forgiving our abusers. We are marginalized due to the threat that our defiance poses to the corrupt religious system that others are beneficiaries of. We are even often portrayed as “crazy” and “mentally ill” without any consideration of the underlining issues that made us that way in the first place.
I suppose someone should remind the Fox News and other conservative news media who would like to pass racist judgments about the Baltimore Uprising that Jesus also challenged the leadership of his day. According to the Bible, he went as far as to twist whips together and violently drive out individuals selling their inventory and using the temple of God for profit. If Jesus were alive today, CNN’s Erin Burnett may have described him as a “thug” on her show. Yet, Jesus is not notorious for being a thug or a criminal. Rather, he is described as the savior and as a prophet. Jesus himself said that prophets are despised and punished in their own day. He was later crucified for his defiance. The truth is that the defiant youth of Baltimore are no more “thugs” than I am “crazy” for telling the truth and being effected by my circumstances. Rather, they are among this generation’s truth tellers and prophets. And as prophets of the past, they have been slandered, attacked, and imprisoned. And as many other believers have committed to do, I too, will do all that I can to continue to stand in their support.