Genu-whine malady

In November 2002, The Boston Globe reported that 16-year-old Sekou Mims began suffering from delusions: White police were following him, white strangers on a train were staring at him menacingly, and he went through angry bouts of extreme nervousness and hyperventilation while simply walking down the street. After a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital, Mims recovered. \nNow, six years later, he is a part-time college student, driver and computer consultant.\nMims' father, a social worker with the Boston Public Schools, expressed his surprise at his son's breakdown when he told the Globe, "He didn't go through what I went through" -- keeping in mind the racism that his grandfather and great-grandfather experienced as black men in America.\nOmar G. Reid, a psychologist, told the boy's father that both black and Latino males were showing up in droves at his clinic with similar symptoms. So Reid now is leading workshops to counsel those wayward souls who, by their own admission, have led lives that "haven't been so bad."\nMims, Reid and Larry Higginbottom, another black social worker, are busy writing a book about what they call "post-traumatic slavery disorder (PTSD)." They believe that drug abuse, broken families, crime and low-educational attainment in segments of the black community can be directly linked to the trauma of slavery, and "black people as a whole are suffering from PTSD." \nAt this point, folks, I'm feeling a bit traumatized myself. I mean, I'm black, I'm male and I live in America, which also means that someone, somewhere in the very roots of my family tree must have suffered from the indignities of institutionalized slavery. Now I'm wondering, "When will the slavery bug sneak up and take a nibble out of my own sense of self-worth?"\nFast-forward five months, and I'm still rubbing elbows with white people, young and old, with little or no ill effect. \nThen, on May 6, clinical psychologist and author Dr. Jeffrey Gardere appeared on the "Unresolved-Problems" segment of "The O'Reilly Factor" to talk about something he liked to call "P-T-slavery-D," and I freaked out all over again. \nBut I must warn you. No, I beg you not to scoff at my insecurity, because this disorder has got some awfully powerful mojo working. If it can creep and crawl across the centuries to gobble up the minds of otherwise healthy males, you have to wonder what P-T-[fill-in-the-blank]-D might do to the rest of humanity, victims and victimizers alike. After all, this thing didn't just stop at the border between black and everybody else -- it got the Latinos, too -- and their ancestors were bought and sold as chattel at least a century before mine were. \nIn a letter submitted November 25, 2002, to the Opinion Journal (www.opinionjournal.com), a Web-based subsidiary of the Wall Street Journal, Roger Butters has admitted to suffering from P-T-Reparations-D. He described his condition as a sense of fear and trepidation brought on by his future culpability for actions that aren't in his past. \nPaul Coates' P-T-Garden-of-Eden-D can best be described as the "mother of all root causes." He said his ancestors were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, and their progeny have had to suffer with the rest of man and womankind ever since. Coates alleged, much to my chagrin, that wars, famine, pestilences, crimes, drug abuse, domestic violence and low-educational attainment have turned up in many segments of the human community for millennia. \nOh, the humanity! Is there not one of us who is safe from this scourge, this tendency toward guilt, self-loathing and the laying of blame at our neighbor's door?