Butterflies and Black Lives Matter and Social Determinants of Mental Health
I glanced out the Westward windows to take in the soft pinkening of the evening sky – the oppressive warmth of a September heat wave keeping me from my cherished sunset walks – when I noticed three young children tentatively approaching my house through the gate. I watched as they headed up the short walkway and the oldest, a boy, caught my eye. He was holding a large, colorful something, and I groaned inwardly: school fundraising season again. I hate telling sweet children that I don’t need their wrapping paper and don’t want to eat caramelized popcorn.
He hesitated. I moved away from the window, toward the front door, preparing to open it, but still they lingered, as though unsure. They hesitated so long I wondered if they had changed their minds and left. Finally, they knocked.
“Hi!” I greeted them warmly.
“Hi,” the oldest replied. “Would you like to buy some stuff?” I had literally just finished “buying some stuff” on Amazon so it would be hard to argue I’m not into that. He showed me pages of cartoon window clings, and then his younger sister chimed in.
“We also have these.” She opened a beat-up Strawberry Shortcake tin, which was when I realized this was no official fundraiser, and began to display for me homemade bits of crocheting. “I made these,” she explained. “This one’s a butterfly.”
“Wow,” I said. “These are beautiful. How much for the butterfly?”
“Two dollars.”
“Let me see if I can find some money.”
I returned with two crumpled bills that I found in two disparate locations, impressed that I had such relics of the pre-Covid era, and extended them to her. I went outside and sat on the porch with the three children. “You’re really talented. I would have no idea how to make these. Keep making art!”
“We all made them,” she admitted generously. “He made this one, and he made this one.” She gestured to her taller and shorter brothers on either side. “I really like butterflies, though.”
“I do too,” said the littlest one. “But not when they land on me, because I’m ticklish.”
“Fair enough,” I laughed.
We chatted a bit more, and I thanked them again and wished them well, then closed the door and watched from the window as they carefully closed my front gate and continued down the street, my heart somehow both warm and heavy.
It reminded me of the sort of things we would do as children of the 80s, rustling up a little money through child-directed entrepreneurship and wandering the neighborhood adult-free. I loved seeing the warmth with which they communicated with one another and supported each other. So natural and easy, unlike my own sibling relationships as a child. Confident, warm, and sweet.
And yet seeing these three children – dark brown skin and tight black curls – knocking on a stranger’s door made my heart ache a little, too. I thought of Trayvon Martin. Of Ralph Yarl. And Ahmaud Arbery. How long until they are told or intuit it is not wise to approach strangers’ doors at dusk?
Is that why the oldest boy, his dark brown eyes having made contact with my own blue eyes through the window, hesitated to knock?
Yes, it’s safer in California, where my young entrepreneurial neighbors and I live. We don’t have those morbid “Stand Your Ground” laws, on the books in 38 states, that give license to homeowners to mow down any neighbors they decide they don’t trust, which have been linked to increases in fatal racist violence12. We don’t have more guns than people in California like most of the country (only 17.6% own a gun here) and naturally, our rate of gun deaths is almost half the national average. Yes, even with the second-largest city in the country and its related gangs. Yes, even as a border state (please visualize my enormous eye roll here at the absurd accusation that immigrants and those seeking asylum from dangerous dynamics in southern countries are innately violent). We’re more diverse, more integrated, more progressive in my neighborhood than in some places.
But we’re not immune.
Racism and violence are everywhere. We must not, cannot be complacent.
Because in that pause outside my door, that hesitation and uncertainty, I perceived anxiety. Whether or not it was there, it is a reality for Black youth (and their families). How can one live in a world where it is unknown whether your neighbors or authorities will treat you with the human dignity you deserve, will protect you or at the very least not actively and callously harm you, without the burden of anxiety? This is an existential, pervasive, collective trauma.
Living in a state of danger is a predicator of trauma. Living with racism, and the degree or extreme of one’s encounters with it throughout daily life, is a social determinant of mental health. Gun violence and vicarious exposure to it throughout society – especially when you see similarities between self and the victims in the news – seeds vicarious trauma. These conditions have lasting and destructive impacts.
Politics and mental health inform one another. We cannot be complacent if we say we love. We must actively pursue change to make this a more just, a safer, and a kinder society for all.
“I like butterflies,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “I plant the flowers that they like so they’ll come and be happy here.”
Let’s cultivate gardens of peace, of welcome, of freedom, inclusion, and love.