From the archives: Black rage

This story was originally published in Newsday on May 9, 1994.

When Dr. Alvin Poussaint lectures a black audience, he often opens with a question.

"How many of you feel like you are welcome in America?" asks Poussaint, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. Few ever raise their hands.

Poussaint, an expert on the psychology of race, says there's a reason so few hands ever go up. "I tell them that they are suffering from racial stress," he said, "a feeling that if white people could, they would send us all out of the country."

Psychiatrists say that blacks in the United States have been particularly vulnerable to racial stress - the feeling, real or perceived, that discrimination or racism has some influence in their lives. A black's anger at being passed up by a cab that stops a few feet away for a white passenger or a black guest's resentment at being mistaken for a bellhop at a hotel lobby, experts say, are just two examples.

"It fuels rage in the black psyche, because, living in America, most blacks are subjected to them on a daily basis," said Dr. Carl T. Bell, a forensic psychiatrist who heads a community mental health clinic in Chicago. "They constitute a form of torture which is meant to make people conform by breaking down their identity."

Racial stress is not recognized as a mental disorder. However, psychiatrists say such stress can cause depression, anxiety and anger.

William Kunstler and Ronald Kuby, attorneys for accused Long Island Rail Road gunman Colin Ferguson, are looking to take that one step further. They say they will attempt to persuade a jury that Ferguson acted out of extreme racial stress - what they are calling "black rage" - when he killed six people and wounded 19 others.

The Jamaican immigrant's anger over his treatment as a black in the United States, his attorneys contend, triggered an already existing mental illness that led to his packing a gun and ammunition in a blue tote bag in December and later walking silently up and down the aisle of a train randomly shooting white and Asian strangers.

"There is a whole history of real or perceived incidents of racism in his life," said Kuby, alluding to Ferguson's complaints that racism played a role in virtually every problem he had, from college to work to a long-running dispute with the state compensation board. When he was arrested, police found notes that railed that racism was the source of his problems and that spoke of his hatred for "whites, Asians and Uncle Tom Negroes."

It is not uncommon for defense attorneys to portray their clients as victims. And although Kunstler has said he believes Ferguson may be schizophrenic, there has been no determination that Ferguson has a mental disorder.

But Ferguson could begin psychological tests as early as this week, according to Kunstler and Kuby. A Nassau County judge refused last month to have the lawyers paid as court-appointed attorneys, but ordered payments up to $ 2,300 to have

Ferguson evaluated by Dr. Richard Dudley Jr., a professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College and an adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law.

Some medical and legal experts say they believe Kunstler and Kuby will have little chance of success with an insanity defense that is based on a novel variation of the "battered wife" or "abused child" syndromes - tactics that led to the acquittal of Lorena Bobbitt, who severed her husband's penis, and to two hung juries in the case of Erik and Lyle Menendez, brothers who killed their parents.

All rely on the theory that the defendants were subjected to repeated abuse until they exploded into violence. But as a National Law Journal poll published last month demonstrated, some theories are more acceptable than others.

The poll showed that fewer than half of the 800 people surveyed nationwide said they would find "black rage" a forceful defense argument. By contrast, 81 percent said they felt "battered wife" was an acceptable defense.

"People under racial stress feel rage and anger," said Dr. Eliot Sorel of Washington, D.C., president-elect of the World Association for Social Psychiatrists. "Some people may turn their anger inward and feel depressed, others outward, depending on the circumstances. But none of these is an excuse for anybody killing anybody."

But just as Kunstler's theory is generating controversy in legal circles, it is also focusing attention on the impact of discrimination and racism in the United States.

"I think Kunstler is putting racism on trial, although arguing that Ferguson is a victim is really the only way he can go," said William Moffitt of Alexandria, Va., a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, one of several lawyers who said they would be watching the case.

Kunstler has acknowledged that attention is as much a goal as Ferguson's defense. "There is an educative factor," he said, acknowledging also that it will be a difficult case to prove. "We want this to be an instructive case so people can learn about black rage and racism."

The Nassau County District Attorney's Office has tried to bring down the curtain on the famed law partners on a couple of occasions. It unsuccessfully tried to get a gag order placed on them. And in court papers two weeks ago, the district attorney's office accused Kunstler and Kuby of encouraging Ferguson to start a fight in jail to show some racial animosity to publicize their "black rage" defense.

The lawyers denied the charges and leveled a few of their own.

They said the county intimidated two inmates to make the claims to avoid a possible civil rights suit for failing to protect Ferguson from five inmates - four whites and an Hispanic - who blackened his eye and broke his nose.

The term Kunstler uses, "black rage," actually was coined by two black psychiatrists more than two decades ago in a book chronicling blacks' frustrations over their search for identity and sense of worth. Dr. William H. Grier and Dr. Price M. Cobbs researched their book "Black Rage" during the turblent decade of the 1960s, an era of civil rights marches and riots.

"Sadly, the term is still valid today," said Grier, who now runs a consulting firm in San Francisco. "The fundamental formulation of who we are and where we fit in still exists."

Other psychiatrists say racism and discrimination continue to reinforce black people's dim view of their place in America as shaped by years of slavery and its aftermath.

Bell said race is the underlying cause of problems for most of his black patients in Chicago. "People come in suffering from anxiety, stress, loneliness and depression, most of the things that whites suffer from. But, in addition, they are trying to cope with the identity of being an Afro-American."

As part of their coping, black people endure what he calls "micro insults," such as being passed up by cabbies, which sends a message that blacks are second-class and second-rate. Such insults, as small as they may appear, can promote anger and can be devastating, he said.

Most blacks take a healthy point of view on dealing with discrimination and racism, Poussaint said. Some take their anger and rage and use it constructively, working harder in a job or using it as an incentive to acquire better skills in a particular area. How blacks cope depends greatly on support systems, such as family members or companions, to use as sounding boards to talk out anger.

However, some blacks channel anger destructively and hurt people, Poussaint said. He cited the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of white officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King and the rising instances of blacks harming other blacks as examples.

Kunstler has consulted Poussaint on his "black rage" theory. But Poussaint said he probably would not testify, because he is not a forensic psychiatrist.

And he said he believed jurors would be reluctant to buy a "black rage" defense. "Jurors would have to acknowledge that there is segregation, that there is unequal opportunity in employment and housing," he said. "They have to come face to face with why these things are so in our society. Not guilty by reason of insanity would be like an indictment of the whole country."

"Looking at it clinically, it's valid," agreed Dr. Harry Davidson of Kansas City. "Black rage falls into the same collective abuse category as a battered wife and an abused child." However, Davidson said it would be difficult to prove, because society is just beginning to understand why past abuse can lead to violence.

Kunstler and Kuby contend that Ferguson's anger is no different from the rage that motivated Bobbitt and the Menendez brothers.

A jury in Virginia acquitted Bobbitt, whose lawyer used the "battered wife" defense. And two separate juries in California reached an impasse in the case of the Menendez brothers, whose lawyer portrayed them as abused children. They are scheduled to be retried.

Experts said the three cases are similar in one respect - each defense team portrayed their clients essentially as victims of post-traumatic stress.

However, those experts said, there is also one great difference between Ferguson's case and those of the others - Bobbitt and the Menendez brothers attacked people they knew, people they believed to be the source of their anger and their stress.
Ferguson struck out against a trainload of strangers.

"Here you have an abused person striking out randomly," said Moffit. "Bobbitt was easier for a jury to swallow. They can believe that it was only a one-time affair. But a jury is going to see Ferguson as a time bomb ready to go off again. They will want to put him away."

Kunstler's defense theory parallels the so-called "urban psychosis" defense, a tactic used two years ago in the case of a black Milwaukee teenager who killed a teenaged acquaintance for her coat.

In that case, attorney Robin Shellow argued that the teen's day-to-day urban life was filled with violence - including a rape when she was 12 years old, guns in her home and watching as relatives shot at one another. "The more naked you walk out into the world, the more you are likely to be affected by it," she said.

Shellow contended that the cumulative effect of the experiences induced post-traumatic stress disorder during which people experience flashbacks and other psychological problems. The condition has been recognized in Vietnam veterans, rape victims, battered spouses and children. The jury did not buy the "the-ghetto-made-me-do-it" argument, however, and convicted the teenager, who is now serving a life sentence.

Ironically, in separate articles on the case, Kunstler and Kuby were quoted as saying they thought the theory would go nowhere. Shellow predicted, however, that as urban violence increases, more attorneys will use it as a defense.

And she said she saw some similarities between the case of the teenager and Ferguson. "You are talking about defenses based on traumatic experiences and social history," she said.

QUOTES

1) Racial strees 'fuels rage in the black psyche because, living in America, most blacks are subjected to (racial insults) on a daily basis.' - Dr. Carl T. bell, forensic psychiatrist
2) 'Not guilty by reason of insanity (in the Colin Ferguson case) would be like an indictment of the whole country.' - Dr. Alvin Poussaint, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.
3) 'People under racial stress feel rage and anger.' - Dr. Eliot Sorel, president-elect of the World Association for Social Psychiatrists.

QUOTE: Quotes by Dr. Carl T. Bell, Dr. Alvin Poussaint and Dr. Eliot Sorel