Like countless other African-Americans, I used to take a certain devilish pride in the myth that, no matter how bad things might get, black people don’t commit suicide, as a rule.
Then my first wife broke the rule.
That was in 1984. Like other young and poor-but-educated black Americans, we were moving up, taking advantage of career opportunities opened up by the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s.
Now, judging by a new study from the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it appears my first wife’s tragedy was an early indicator of a terrible trend. Black teen suicides, once quite rare, have sharply increased in the first generation of youths to be born since the substantial growth of America’s black middle class.
Teens, facing the most emotionally wrenching periods in most people’s lives, traditionally have the highest suicide rates. The new study released Friday by the centers shows the suicide gap between black and white youths is narrowing. The rate for black youths aged 15 to 19 more than doubled, to 8.1 per 100,000 in 1995 from 3.6 per 100,000 in 1980, the study shows.
During the same period, the gap between white and black teen suicides has narrowed since 1980 when the white rate was twice as high as the black rate to 1995 when the white rate was only 42 percent higher than the black rate.
For suicide attempts by high school youths, one 1995 study found the gap in suicide attempts closed completely to where black students were just as likely as whites to try to kill themselves, whether they succeeded or not.
Teens are only a leading indicator of a larger tragedy. Suicide have increased among younger and older African-Americans, too, although in less dramatic numbers.
Why is this happening? Traditional African-American culture attached a healthy dose of pride to the black community’s low suicide rates and a heavy dose of shame to anyone who even considered doing themselves in.
We might be poor and oppressed, the conventional thinking went, but our will to survive and “overcome” is relentless. Our will was so strong, the conventional wisdom went, that it produced a wealth of cultural treasures like jazz, the blues, a wide variety of dances and a deeply ironic humor.
As Glenn Loury, an African-American and director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, told a Washington Post reporter, “I’m reminded of that old comedian’s line–blacks don’t commit suicide because you can’t jump out of a basement window.”
But some experts say assimilation into the middle class has drawn too many blacks away from traditional social foundations like family and church, institutions that gave us strength in the past.
I won’t argue with that. But, as one who found himself gaining a rapid education in the mysteries of suicide after losing a loved one, the statistics leave me asking another question: Are black teen suicides really on the rise? Or do we simply do a better job of diagnosing and counting suicides when they happen in the middle class, where suicide reveals itself in more glaringly obvious ways?
More Top Picks Best Infrared Saunas For Small Rooms
We must remember, after all, that black male teen homicide rates, at 111 per 100,000 in 1995, still dwarf the black male teen suicide rates and still afflict mostly the poor. So do drugs, alcohol and sexually transmitted diseases.
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, how many of those deaths are really suicides by other means?
The roots are often the same, particularly for teens: depression, lack of self-worth, a sense of hopelessness, a crushing despair about one’s future and a dwindling reverence for life, including one’s own.
Self-destruction is self-destruction. The boy who puts his life on the line for gang battles has invested his sense of self-worth in a street gang as a coping mechanism in the absence of anything else to make him feel worthwhile. So does the drug addict.
Psycho-sociological experts are just beginning to acknowledge and try to take account of the many nefarious ways a perverse, short-sighted machismo leads countless black youths into suicidal situations.
Unfortunately, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have yet to find a way to measure such indirect forms of suicide. But the rest of us don’t need social scientists to recognize the problem and begin to do something about it.
Suicide by any means among a nation’s youth is suicide for the nation. The best prevention is a sense of hope. With hope, you can feel the beckoning call of a brighter future and the optimism that will help you get there.
Many of us have shown through our personal success that we have lots of hope. Good for us. We need to spread some of it around.