Trigger Warning: This article contains discussion of suicide, SA and racism which may be upsetting for some readers.
Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for free service in English 24/7: 1-800-273-8255
Llame al Lifeline Nacional de Prevención del Suicidio para servicios gratuitos en español 24/7: 1-888-628-9454
As we returned to campus this semester, students raised questions about preserving the memory of our peer who died by suicide—Kristy Shi ‘22. At the time of her passing, the college encouraged us to “heal together” from this “saddening loss.” The college neglected Shi’s identity as a woman of color and as an Asian woman during the early months of COVID-19 quarantine—a traumatic period for the Asian community to navigate the United States.
We confronted anti-AAPI racism in the context of the pandemic both as a nation and in the campus community at the time, so why did we fall so short in meeting the emotional necessities of our own AAPI peers? Between the internet activism, the “real” world and the lived experience of our peer, there was a disconnect. That disconnect is deadly and it must be addressed.
Earlier this year, Time magazine reported that suicide rates among Black girls age 13-19 in the U.S. increased by 182% between 2001 and 2017. Ashawnty Davis was a young Black girl with a dream of becoming a basketball star, and not old enough to form part of this statistic when she took her own life in 2017 after being bullied on TikTok–then known as Musical.ly–and in school.
While Black women have consistently endured the most heinous levels of emotional distress that the nation has to offer, quantitative research methods have also failed to document their lived experiences. Statistics as recent as a decade ago claim that Black women have the “lowest rates of suicide in the nation,” a paradox attributed by researchers to misclassification.
Ashawnty’s case illustrates this paradox. The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) described this circumstance of her untimely death that “garnered attention as a child suicide and as a case of bullying; it did not trigger a conversation about the troubles of Black girls. Statistics do little of the qualitative work necessary to deepen a social understanding of Black girls’ and women’s self-destructive as well as self-sustaining behaviors.”
What might a conversation about the mental health of Black girls look like? How do we talk about the heartbreaking death of a brilliant soul without deracializing the lifetime of racialized violence she endured? Meaningful mental health conversations tend to be few and far between in minority communities; we don’t have spare time to change that.
The mental health taboo is particularly prevalent in Latinx communities and families. Refinery29 reports that experts attribute many young Latinas’ mental health problems to “generational misunderstandings, common between first-generation children and immigrant parents.” A number of ethnically-unique factors contribute to Latina girls’ suicidal ideation, from machismo, to cultural fetishization and generational trauma.
Added to these challenges is the rarity of candid conversations about mental health in the Latinx community. Even progressive Latinx news outlets resort at times to the traps of desensitized quantitative research, going so far as to call our community a “historically immune population” to suicidal ideation. This ignorance stems perhaps from the impossibility of quantifying what is never spoken.
The mental health challenges of religious discrimination are another unspoken truth that women of color grapple with. Cultural stigma impedes the mental wellness of discriminated Muslim American communities, according to an NPR report. Still in the aftermath of 9/11, these are traumatizing times to be Muslim in this country: where children grow up labeled as terrorists by politicians and the media and tormented in the nation’s ruthless schoolyards and public spaces. Adding to the challenge this poses for Muslim youths’ mental health, Dr. Farha Abbasi of Michigan State University’s Muslim Mental Health Consortium, explains that “if you believe that your mental illnesses will bring shame on you or your family, then you tend to stay silent about it.”
The Eurocentric colonial society in which we live already has a tendency to view Muslim women as silenced and oppressed bodies because of their religious beliefs. Some feminist circles, lacking in intersectionality, prefer to speak for Muslim women than to uplift their voices. Far from helping anybody, these behaviors further silence a population already dealing with mental health stigma, xenophobia and racism.
Native communities face higher rates of both suicide and sexual assault than all other racial or ethnic groups in the country, according to a report by the National Indian Council on Aging (NICOA). The CDC reported a 139% increase in the suicide rates of Native women over the past twenty years. Their mental health is uniquely harmed by legacies of historical disenfranchisement, genocide, assimilation pressures, cultural isolation and institutional racism.
Despite culturally underreported cases of sexual assault in Alaska Native communities, the state is still the “rape capital of the U.S.,” with child sexual assault at six times the national average. The Atlantic tells the story of an Alaska Native community with rape culture embedded into the fabric of its tribal council. A 4-H club in the village gained national recognition and support after it became an outlet for the community’s women to share their lived experiences with suicidal ideation and sexual assault. Still, a survivor admits that things eventually “went back like the old way,” after the spotlight had faded from their community.
It is time for conversations about suicide and the suicide of girls and young women to stop neglecting the racial narrative. We owe it to these victims to consider the roles that their racialized bodies can play in their mental health struggles. When circumstances of racism and racialization exist that can take someone’s life, we cannot just call it a heartbreaking case of bullying, or a devastating instance of isolation. We owe it to victims of color to consider how their deaths might be the final and desperate attempt of the soul to escape its racialized body.
