Communitywide Trauma Demands Holistic Healing for Black and Latinx New Yorkers
The disproportionate impact of the Covid crisis on communities of color in New York City is well documented.
The pandemic illuminated and exacerbated longstanding structural inequality along racial and economic lines. Black and Latinx New Yorkers experienced higher rates of Covid-19 infection and hospitalization. Neighborhoods of color are also battling higher eviction rates. When the pandemic closed public schools, inequitable access to technology for remote learning put lower-income Black and Latinx students at a disadvantage compared to their peers.
At the same time, police violence against Black people brought protesters into the streets across the country, while shootings – already a primary cause of death for young Black people – rose during the pandemic.
The pain of the past year and a half has compounded the historical and collective trauma that Black and Latinx communities have experienced for generations. The unresolved trauma needs healing. Therefore a community healing agenda must be a policy priority. The current election year presents an opportunity to begin the process.
Significant changes in City government are expected this fall with the election of a new mayor and virtually complete turnover in other City elected positions. As so often in political races, the candidates face tough questions on their plans across a range of policy areas, such as schools, crime, and transportation.
Too often, however, policy areas are siloed during campaigns and remain so after elected officials take office, leaving longstanding intersectional issues unaddressed. For example, both Democratic candidate Eric Adams and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa won their respective mayoral primaries with messages focused on their ability to keep the city safe, with the issue of public safety itself centered on the extent to which law enforcement should be the primary solution. As a result, the general election will be headlined by a former police officer and a vigilante, obscuring the multitude of elements that drive crime to begin with.
The siloed approach to policy is insufficient to address the entrenched intergenerational challenges for some of New York City's hardest-hit communities -- places like Brownsville, East Harlem, and Southeast Queens. Predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods have endured harmful public policies for decades, including urban renewal, benign neglect, and stop and frisk – government actions that fuel collective community trauma.
Conventional notions of trauma are confined to the individual-level experience, but large-scale societal harm – such as structural inequality – can inflict trauma at the community-level. Elected leaders need to advance policies that address intergenerational harm across multiple intersecting areas of government and the people they serve.
What is a community healing agenda? It is a comprehensive program that recognizes the intersection of policy areas and the historical collective traumas that Black and Latinx communities face. It looks beyond treating the symptoms of collective trauma alone, and instead seeks to build long-term strength, vitality, and wholeness for communities unaccustomed to such privilege.
Policy problems don't exist in a vacuum; education, public safety, and housing are just a few areas that overlap. Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio instituted different education policies during their respective tenures, yet neither were able to deconstruct entrenched racial and economic inequality in New York City schools. Research shows that exposure to violence in the community has an impact on achievement in the classroom. All five of the City's district attorneys have publicly called for criminal justice reform, yet it is clear that the concentration of Black and Latinx people in New York State prison cannot be ended without substantive changes to education and housing. These are complex problems that require multifaceted policy solutions to heal Black and Latinx communities.
Although the term “community healing agenda” may not yet be widely familiar, some of its underlying principles are not new. When President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, one of his signature policy proposals was integrating education, housing, and community development. The Promise Neighborhoods program at the Department of Education was launched in tandem with the Choice Neighborhoods program at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The programs were designed to focus holistically on specific neighborhoods.
Promise and Choice Neighborhoods were inspired by the renowned Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a non-profit organization that seeks to address intergenerational poverty through intensive educational and wraparound social services in a defined section of Harlem. Together, the Promise and Choice Neighborhoods programs were intended to directly address intergenerational poverty and revitalize communities, recognizing the intersection of education, employment, health, housing, and transportation.
Unfortunately, the initiatives received only a fraction of the funding from Congress that Obama requested, and lacked sufficient political support to realize the original vision. Nevertheless, if New York’s next mayor and City Council unified around a community healing agenda they could draw inspiration from this Obama-era idea in developing policies crafted for healing intergenerational trauma.
To truly serve the people of New York and address the inequities laid bare over the past 18 months, the next mayor and City Council will need to consider a policy agenda that prioritizes community healing, recognizes historical trauma, and operates within the intersections of multiple policy areas.
Fortunately, New York City has a wealth of community leaders with experience, ideas, and cultural proficiency who can begin to formulate the foundation of such an agenda. We will bring you these leaders and their ideas in the coming weeks. It will, we hope, spark an ongoing conversation on community healing and public policy.
This fall, Urban Matters will present an occasional series that brings together perspectives on forming such a community healing agenda and building long-term strength, vitality, and wholeness for Black and Latinx New Yorkers.