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medpundit |
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Thursday, November 14, 2002Sekou Mims's son was 16 when he experienced a sudden psychotic breakdown. Over three months, the black teenager had a series of delusions - that white police were following him, that white strangers on a train were staring at him menacingly. He'd hyperventilate walking down the street. All his delusions revolved around racism. Mr. Mims is a social worker, and he’s convinced that his son’s fixation with racism stems from slavery, even though his son was never a slave. I had a similar sort of disorder when I was a young girl growing up not very far from a small liberal college town in Ohio, but my disorder involved a morbid fear of hippies. I was never harmed by a hippy, nor did I ever personally meet a hippy. But, in 1968, I was six years old, and I heard my parents and my grandparents talk repeatedly about “those damned hippies” and their drug use and the danger they posed to society, and I watched hippies riot on television. They scared me witless. I would duck and cover in the back seat of the car if I saw a long-haired, poorly-washed person on the street. I would cling closely to my mother and beg to go home if we encountered a sixties-era bohemian in the grocery store. I never reached the extremes of the young Mims, but I definitely had a hippy phobia. Clearly, the source of my fear was the anti-hippy sentiments of all those around me. Something similar is most likely the source of Mims’ disorder, especially when you consider his father’s bio: Mims, 46, grew up in poverty in Boston and spent a number of his adolescent years in reform school for petty crimes and assaults. Later, he joined the Nation of Islam and worked in human services for the court system and a halfway house, before earning a master's degree in social work. How much of the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam do you suppose the younger Mims was fed as a youngster? Probably a lot. Social worker, heal thyself. UPDATE: A reader sent along another example of social worker myopia. posted by Sydney on 11/14/2002 07:26:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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