No one was sitting near us at the fast food chain, but my dad lowered his voice anyway.
“You were three or four years old,” he said. “We were watching an NBA game on TV. You asked, ‘Where are the white people who play?’ Even little kids notice these things.”
“How did you answer my question?”
“I didn’t.”
About 5% of inmates in the jail are in psychiatric housing at any given time. My current post assignment is with males who demonstrate acute symptoms, which comprises about 2% of the entire jail population. A small team works with this 2%.
To be clear, not all people with psychiatric conditions are put in psychiatric housing. Sometimes people start there and, as their condition improves, they move on to general population housing. Some people with psychiatric conditions never come to psychiatric housing. How one behaves, not one’s diagnosis, determines where one is housed.
I don’t know if the racial mix of my patients is proportional to the racial mix of all the people in jail. It’s rare that the patients I care for are comprised of only one race. I have yet to ask, “Where are all the white people?” However, I’ve certainly asked that before in another correctional setting.
I’ve often framed the processes of clinical work as a game. Maybe this is a product of clinical training: When working in hospital services, you’ve “won the game” if you were able to discharge all of your patients. You make informal wagers as to the duration of rounding: “Oh, our attending is Dr. So-and-So, so we’ll finish in less than an hour, tops,” or “Dr. Blah-Blah is on service now. You think three hours? Four? Five?!”
It’s probably just one way of coping.
While on various outreach teams, the objective of the game was to keep all of my patients out of the hospital. When working in a clinic in a medical center, it was to get all my patients well enough so that I could send them back to primary care. Now, the game is to get them out of the most acute unit and prevent them from returning. (The object of the game really should be how to keep people out of jail. That requires coordinated efforts across space and time, particularly for people with complex psychiatric conditions.)
Sometimes my patients are young black males. Sometimes they talk about problems they’ve had with officers or other inmates in the jail.
“I don’t want you to come right back to this unit if we send you out.” That’s how I usually start it. “If someone else gives you a hard time or starts being a jerk to you, what are you going to do to help you stay there and not get sent back here?”
People are often doing much better by the time we’re able to have this conversation. They usually provide reasonable answers.
Even though no one else is sitting near us, I then lower my voice.
“You’re a young black man. Some people here—not everyone, but some of them—react to you in certain ways just because of the color of your skin. That’s not fair, but, sometimes, that’s what happens. You know this much better than I do.”
I remain struck with how their faces soften. Jail is a hard place to be and people adopt hard expressions on their faces. When this coversation happens, these young black men invariably smile, but not from joy.
“So if something happens, you have to figure out how to respond so that you’re not the one who comes back here. Does that make sense?”
Sometimes they thank me for talking about race; sometimes they tell me that they already know what they need to do; sometimes they simply assert, “Don’t worry, I won’t come back here.”
Why do I lower my voice when I talk about this? Would I bring this up if I were a white female? a white male? Does the fact that I look obviously Asian work in my favor? Do I need to bring up something that they already know? Am I just being rude? Do good intentions matter when people find the intentions condescending?
Am I actually helping them when I frame things this way? Or am I only making myself feel better?
It’s a small sample size and completely anecdotal: After we have this conversation, they don’t return to the unit.
Maybe they were never going to come back, anyway.
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