By Dr. Alexis Jemal
For undergrad, I majored in Sociology and had a double minor in Criminology and International Studies. My career goal was to work for the UN on human rights violations. Then I read a quote in my Sociology textbook: “Stealing bread is wrong, whether it’s done by the king or the man living beneath the bridge.” I pondered how some ideas can be true and untrue simultaneously. Although Lady Liberty is blindfolded, she sees very clearly the color of a person’s skin and their socioeconomic status. The existing criminal justice system provided more than enough human rights violations in my own backyard that could keep me busy for an entire career, and so I went to law school to be an advocate for the person living under the bridge.
While waiting for my NJ and NY Bar exam results, I interned at several places, including in the chambers of a federal judge and with the NY Civil Liberties Union. At a legal services organization that provided legal assistance to indigent people (e.g., landlord tenant and eviction issues), I learned that if you don’t address root causes and/or issues holistically, then you’re helping to push the revolving door. However, my time at the Office of the Public Defender proved to be the most important for my career development. After working on a drug deal case for a Black male defendant with a newish White female attorney, I witnessed how macro forces have micro consequences. After we lost the case on the difference between “shave” and “shape up,” the court officers shackled my client and took him away.
Walking back to the office from the courthouse, I noticed school buses filled with black and brown folks, only the lettering on the side of the bus said “NJDOC” (Department of Corrections) rather than “NJDOE” (Department of Education). This image encapsulated the racialized school to prison pipeline. evidenced that racial disparities in the criminal justice system and targeted mass incarceration are systemic and structural. The history, culture, and legacy of the criminal justice system in this country rooted in white supremacy, imposed policies that have a racially disparate impact, mass produced “bad apples,” and condoned overt and covert racist practices. The place to cut the pipeline for targeted mass incarceration of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) needed to be earlier than the bus rides to prison.
I started looking for employment at Settlement Houses where I believed I could be on an inter and multi-disciplinary team providing holistic services. Somehow, I decided to answer a Craigslist ad for a research assistant position. After listening to my passions and interests, the researcher directed me to the Rutgers Center for Behavioral Health Services and Criminal Justice Research, which to my surprise was directed by the person who happened to serve as my independent study advisor during my senior year in college.
When I started at the Center as a research assistant, they were testing the Seeking Safety intervention at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for women. This gave me my first taste of intervention research and I savored the flavor. The Center focused on mental health services issues that arise when persons with mental illness have encounters with the criminal justice system and then it expanded its services into areas of co-occurring substance use. This work started pulling together the pieces of my research agenda: Racism, Trauma, Health, Violence, Criminal Justice, Substance Use, Intervention, Critical Participatory Action Research.
The Center’s multidisciplinary team tested interventions that incorporated building academic partnerships with community organizations, state agencies and policymakers; and involving stakeholders at all stages of the research and dissemination process. One goal for the Center was to build the power holders’ capacity to apply research in practice and in policymaking. These objectives, with the addition of involving the target population, incorporating the knowledge of those with lived experience, and centering the voices of those most impacted, provided the foundation upon which I have built my research career.
While working at the Center, I enrolled in the MSW program at Rutgers – but before I knew I was accepted, I took two non-matriculated summer courses and one of them exposed me to the remake of the Clark and Clark doll experiment evidencing the psychological trauma that occurs to Black children living in a White supremacist society. What intervention could I create that would address the psychological harm, the internalized racism, of Black children who are inundated with messages of White supremacy?
With this question on my heart, I became one of two students to be admitted to the inaugural joint MSW/PhD program at Rutgers. I connected with my mentor, Dr. Liliane Windsor, who was using community-based participatory research (CBPR) to develop and test Community Wise,a multi-level, behavioral health intervention grounded in critical consciousness (CC) theory that aims to reduce substance use, related HIV/STI health risk behaviors, psychological distress, and reoffending among BIPOC transitioning from incarceration into the Newark, NJ community. Dr. Windsor and I co-authored the intervention manual. My involvement as clinical facilitator with the participants of Community Wise and my role as a member of the Newark Community Collaborative Board (NCCB), the group responsible for developing Community Wise, strengthened my commitment to community partnerships that involve the target population as innovators and problem solvers for individual and community development. We developed collaborative approaches that combined methods of inquiry with community-capacity building strategies. Most importantly, my involvement with Community Wise moved my thinking about points of intervention from only at the individual level to include intervention at multiple levels, effectively bridging the micro-macro divide.
Community Wisewas theoretically grounded in the development of Freirian critical consciousness (i.e., awareness of and action against oppressive realities) as the mechanism of change. We therefore needed a way to measure critical consciousness to test the intervention theory. My dissertation, entitled Transformative Consciousness: Conceptualization, Scale Development and Testing,started with the plan to develop a scale of critical consciousness; however, the state of the literature directed that I develop my own theory of Transformative Potential (TP).
After graduating from my doctoral program, I claimed intervention research for health equity as my area of expertise. Building on my Community Wise experiences, I used community organizing as the clinical intervention. I developed, implemented, and tested interventions grounded in critical theory, particularly my theory of Transformative Potential. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (King 1958), recognizing the interplay of social injustice processes and outcomes, stated, “There must be a rhythmic alteration between attacking the causes and healing the effects”. This quote has become my mantra and my professional raison d’etre.
Critical-radical social work became, for me, the meaning of LCSW (Licenses Critical-Radical Social Worker). With my new license, I aimed to facilitate the development of critical consciousness and then transform consciousness into action. I began training in and practicing more action-oriented clinical methods like psychodrama and sociodrama. I began incorporating these methods into my intervention development work trying to disrupt the relationship between racism-based trauma and internalized racism and poor health (including the involvement with the criminal justice system which has proven to not only be unhealthy but also a matter of life or death). I created and studied action-oriented interventions with action-oriented research methods.
In summer 2019, I participated in an intensive Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) training and one exercise was to write something to the people for whom we do this work. I wrote: Since the day I saw the video of Kiri Davis’ high school project, a remake of the Clark & Clark doll experiment, your face has been etched into my mind scape. I do not know your name or the names of your parents but, yet I call out to you as if I was your mom. I replay the moment you told the interviewer, by pointing to the black doll instead of the white doll, that she was the bad one, the ugly one, the stupid one. Then, she asked you the soul crippling question, Which one looks like you? You instinctively reached for the white doll – wanting to pull it toward you – but your hand stopped as if hitting a brick wall. You hesitantly switched direction. Barely touching the black doll, you pushed that disgusting, black thing toward the interviewer and lowered your shame-filled eyes. I cried then and I cry now because I know your pain intimately. I’ve seen it in my own eyes. And I’ve seen it in my daughter’s. To all the little black girls who wished they were white at one time, now or in the future.
The exploration and integration of the creative and academic sides of my brain, led me to enroll in a Master of Applied Theatre program at CUNY School of Professional Studies. Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” stemming from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressedinspired theatre practitioners to apply their gifts to interrogating oppressive systems, spotlighting structural violence, providing a platform to the silenced, generating radical imagination, and inciting action for social justice. Applied Theatre is a critical consciousness, community and cultural organizing, and action research all wrapped into one package. I became committed to embedding the arts in my work.
One of my applied theatre classes required that I revisit Freire’s text and I was assigned to present on “cultural invasion.” This phenomenon is always an act of violence in which the attackers invade the cultural context of another group, disrespect and exploit the invaded ones’ potentialities; the attackers impose their own worldview, norms, and values upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by stifling their expression (Freire, 2000, p. 152).
“For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority. Since everything has its opposite, if those who are invaded consider themselves inferior, they must necessarily recognize the superiority of the invaders. The values of the latter thereby become the pattern for the former…The more invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be like the invaders: to walk like them, dress like them, talk like them.” (Freire, 2000, p. 153) Up until this point, I understood internalized racism from lived experience, but Freire provided language that complimented the impact I felt from daily living in a dehumanizing society.
Over the past five years, Transformative Potential has evolved into a theoretical framework for healing, equity, innovation, and reconciliation through personal, relational, and environmental transformation. This theoretical framework bridges heads, hearts and hands for racial justice, healing, and liberation. I also developed a method to put theory into practice. The method aims to make the invisible, visible by investigating processes, procedures, practices, people, programs, priorities, plans, possibilities, and policies for equity and justice.
Where I am now in my journey is that I realize the issue that I am addressing is dehumanization and the outcome my multi-level, social-cultural, behavioral health interventions is to work toward liberation by dismantling, radically reimagining, and building our realities in community with indigenous, afro-centric, feminist, trauma-informed and healing centered practices.
Future directions include exploring a new area comprised of neuroscience, epigenetics, and neuro-anthropology to investigate how humanizing and liberation-based interventions affect the brain and epigenome over time.
Dr. Alexis Jemal is an assistant professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College in New York City.
Papers
Bussey, S., Jemal, A., & *Caliste, S[1]. (2021). Transforming social work’s potential in the field: A radical framework. Social Work Education,40(1), 140 – 154.
Jemal, A. (2021). Healing lives in community: The integrated transformative potential intervention development (InTrePID) method. Genealogy, 5(4) https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5010004
Jemal A.(in press). Liberation-based social work theory in progress: Time to practice what I teach. Qualitative Social Work
Jemal, A., *Lopez, T., *Hipscher, J., & *O’Rourke, B. (in press). Theatre for liberation-based social work education. ArtPraxis, 7(2b), 116-131.
Jemal, A., *Urmey, L. S., & Caliste, S. (2020).From sculpting an intervention to healing in action.Social Work with Groups, in press.
Jemal, A.,Bussey, S., Young, B. (2019). Steps to racial reconciliation: A movement to bridge the racial divide and restore humanity. Social Work & Christianity, 47(1), 31-60.
Jemal, A.(2018). Transformative consciousness of health inequities: Oppression is a virus and critical consciousness is the antidote. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 3(4), 202-215. https://rdcu.be/2Cxm.
Jemal, A. & Bussey, S. (2018). Transformative action: A theoretical framework for breaking new ground.EJournal of Public Affairs. http://www.ejournalofpublicaffairs.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/211-1311-1-Galley.pdf
Jemal, A.(2017a). Critical consciousness: A critique and critical analysis of the literature, Urban Review, 49, 4, 602-626.DOI: 10.1007/s11256-017-0411-3
Jemal, A. (2017b). The opposition. Journal of Progressive Human Services: Radical Thought and Practice (JPHS), 28(3), 134-139. DOI: 10.1080/10428232.2017.1343640.
* Indicates first time publishing.