Welcome to the second edition of the Surviving Race newsletter. In this issue, there are stories on recovery and emotional wellness, acts of bravery and thriving in spite of systematic racism, psychiatry and immigration.
Surviving Race: The Intersection of Disability, Injustice and Human rights is a coalition comprised of people of color speaking to police brutality, white privilege, Disability, race, LGBTQI2SA, human rights, psychiatry, antipsychiatry and we are mental health advocates and survivors. Surviving Race supports the voices of people with disabilities and protects our communities from mentalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism and islamophobia.
Thank you,
Celia Brown, Co-founder of Surviving Race
We are working on a Surviving Race retreat in Atlanta, Georgia in 2021. This retreat will focus on strategies to combat racism, sexism, disability and human rights.
We want to uplift our voices to change the conditions in our community and the world. We are up against so much hate and fear in our society today. As Stevie Wonder says in his song, “Love is in need of Love today.” Please contact Surviving Race to get involved in the planning by emailing survivingrace2014@gmail.com.
My mother, Maria Casanova was an RN in Madrid, Spain before meeting and marrying her beloved (Pete, my dad) who served in the US Army overseas. They were together for 49 years before my mom died in 2008. She spoke not a word of English. My parents spoke French and my dad taught himself Spanish to correspond with her and to woo her, basically and woo he did. They fell in love nearly immediately and had a storybook happy ending. She taught herself English by watching soap operas when they arrived at Oahu, Hawaii after my sister Florence was born.
She had great difficulty with the English language and nuances and because of the language barrier, she was never able to again work as an RN in the US. What she did end up doing was teaching English as a Second Language later on and taught for over 20 years at my high school in the San Joaquin Valley. She felt very strongly about speaking English and we were not allowed to speak Spanish at home because of my parents' expectations and cultural mores to "assimilate." Now, I wish I had continued speaking Spanish or even French. My sister insisted on speaking Spanish and later became fully Bilingual in Eng/Spanish, taught and also was a Master Nurse at Marin General before she died in 2012.
I guess I'm just trying to express that I understand the expectations in language and cultural assimilation because I come from it too. My mom was very ashamed of her accent and she would knee-jerk every time somebody asked her, "are you an American?" She had a tough time with it.
I'm sensitive to remarks or what may appear an unintentional bias because growing up in the US, third-generation American, a woman of Color, half white half brown, with a white mother who acquired her US Citizenship in 1960, struggling to teach herself and master English as an immigrant from Spain taught me to understand the linguistic and cultural challenges of coming to the US for whatever reason.
I have deep admiration for driven individuals who come to the US alone and who accomplish their dreams and do work with meaning in any field. I see immigration and scapegoating today and it hurts me when I hear, read, see statements to "national language" but I can also differentiate between cultural expectations and strengths. When I was in Denmark with my family in 1971-1976 I was seen as the Immigrant and American and hated. Because of my skin color, I was taunted and discriminated against because while I was an American I was not Caucasian. I learned Danish and German, as a result, to blend in and to honor the national countries we lived in.
My Spanish, however, needs work. I watch ICE and the Atlanta Police Department detain people who are not US Citizens and it hurts to watch and it's scary. I hope to be able to work with immigration in some way when I acquire my Social Work certs and licenses because it's where I come from.
On Race...21st Century
By Dwayne Mayes
Hmmm...let’s see...the first time I recall personally experiencing racism was when I started attending an integrated High School in Brooklyn, NY in the mid-1970s. It was during a woodshop class when an upperclassman called me a stupid ni@@a and said that I was genetically inferior...fortunately, the shop teacher who was the same complexion as that guy came to my rescue and expelled him from the class on the spot.
Then I recall walking to a friend’s house in a mostly religious neighborhood nearby, and a mother and daughter chose to walk into the street to avoid passing me on the sidewalk. I was confused because I thought I was nicely dressed and groomed...and not seeming a threat to anyone.
Thenduring my first undergraduate experience, it was obvious that every incoming black freshman was deemed required to take a remedial speech class for only one credit, while freshmen from other ethnicities and specific religions were excused...even though their diction and accents were quite pronounced. Again, I was baffled because I had already been speaking professionally throughout the nation to audiences who could not tell my ethnicity by listening alone.
These experiences helped me understand that I would be subject to others’ perceptions of me, regardless of howI presented.Judgments and expectations would be assigned to me simply because of my complexion. There was nothing I could do.
While these were my personal experiences of racist attitudes and behaviors, they also set the foundation for me to understand that systemic and institutional racism and bigotry was simply a reflection of the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals who work for and within those institutions.
There is a power differential inherent in most societies...and I happened to be at the lower end of that distribution. This meant that I would always have to work harder to achieve some measure of personal satisfaction. I’ve watched this play out on the bigger scales. At one time a bachelor’s degree was required for a better paying job, that soon became a master’s degree requirement, and often a Doctorate degree...the milestone of being a millionaire soon became a billionaire. The goals kept shifting as the oppressed rose up and achieved more and more. Inequality seems to be inherent in this society and culture.
When a disability is added to the equation of challenges to overcome, it becomes even more daunting to consider how hard one must work to become “successful”. So, what is there to do?
I decided to check my own values first...to decide what is important for me to be happy. Is it the acceptance of others that motivate and inspire me to be the best human I can or is it something more?
Can I live among people who think and feel differently about serious matters which are important to me? My answer is yes. I have learned, for the sake of my personal peace, to allow others to be who they are...and limit their ability to impact my life if it is not positive.
Bonnie Burstow: Celebrating A Mother of the Antipsychiatry Movement
By Lauren Tenney, PhD, MPhil, MPA, BPS, Psychiatric Survivor
TheHuman Rights Movement for People who have Psychiatric Histories lost one of the greatest allies we have ever had. It is with tremendous sadness that I write this to remember our Canadian ally, Doctor Bonnie Burstow, PhD, author, activist, feminist psychologist, human.
When I learned of Bonnie’s passing, I immediately felt the loss of someone who I had connected with, who offered her friendship, her guidance, and a world of knowledge and fervor. Bonnie was a pillar in our movement, and personally, she was a pillar in my academic work. Truth be told, if it were not for Bonnie’s support of what I am trying to do, I probably would not have gotten access to publishing materials, presenting at conferences, or organizing conferences that I have been afforded by the access she worked so hard to secure for people who are psychiatric survivors.
Bonnie Burstow was a huge support to Surviving Race and Surviving Race also, immediately felt the loss of Bonnie’s passing. We had turned to Bonnie for guidance on addressing anti-Semitism in the U.S.. We were awaiting a response from Bonnie about writing an article on anti-Semitism for this Surviving Race Newsletter. I had been so hopeful she was celebrating the new year, as it was entirely unlike her not to respond, nearly immediately to any request. Soon after, we learned that Bonnie Burstow passed, after an acute illness, on January 4, 2020.
Burstow touched the lives of many people around the world. There is a live stream of her memorial available, I encourage you to view it, and see the ways she affected those who loved her and were with her, in Toronto.
Thoseof you who knew Bonnie Burstow will remember that she fought with fervor from a position that she crafted within academia to rail against the psychiatric industry. Truth laid upon truth, Burstow spent more than five decades mounting a case against psychiatry. From her exposes on electric shock treatment to her opus magnum, Psychiatry and the Business of Madness, where line by line Burstow explains how the fraud of psychiatry is instituted in our society.
Istill am embarrassed to admit that when Bonnie first asked me to review her novel, The Other Mrs. Smith, I did not understand why a novel would matter. I had never been more wrong about this idea and the power of an immediately consuming story that allowed for an intimate look at the realities of those who are subjected to electric shock treatment and psychiatric drugging.
Burstow also created avenues for others to publish work from an antipsychiatry and human rights framework, including psychiatric survivors, in anthologies such as Psychiatry Interrogated where each chapter, including a team of people took apart a problem of psychiatry, specifically laying out how events take place, so we could identify exactly where human rights violations occurred. Celia Brown, Kathryn Cascio, Angela Cerio, and Beth Grundfest-Frigeri and myself have a chapter in that anthology, “Spirituality Psychiatrized: A Participatory Planning Process” that starts to map out ways that people, in policy and regulation, and official guidance, are psychiatrized for their spiritual beliefs.
Ialso was honored to have a dialogue with Bonnie that she reprinted through The Revolt Against Psychiatry. Bonnie had a real concern for young people and we talked in-depth about what it means as we are now moving into the second generation of young people who will not know what it means to not have a psychiatric evaluation. We had visions of creating a Canadian-American conference focusing on the realities young people are up against concerning psychiatry. I hope that such a conference is still possible.
Bonnie used this method of dialogue with others who are working from a frame of holding the field of psychiatry accountable to the truth as well and crafted a place for us to have a position inside the academy through The Revolt Against Psychiatry.
The Revolt Against Psychiatry, Bonnie’s last book is officially being launched on January 24, 2020, in Toronto, Canada. It is as devastating that Bonnie will not be at the launch of her final book as is the idea that no other volumes will come from this brilliant woman who wanted to see situations of oppression entirely out rooted.
No one who reads Burstow’s work, if being honest, could with academic authenticity, dispute her conclusions, that the field of psychiatry must be accountable to the truth.
Burstow, along with those involved in the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault spearheaded daily, and famously, annual Mothers Day protests against shock treatment.
Burstow spent decades from every angle, as an academic, activist, fictional writer, public speaker, media commentator, and more, battling psychiatry, and particularly brain-damaging, soul-crushing, life-threatening electric shock treatment (electroconvulsive treatment, ECT) and psychiatric drugs.
Burstow also innovatively devised alternatives to support people who were struggling with the realities trauma had to go up against, by devising “counter-hegemonic trauma courses” that urged professionals being trained to work with people to look at the multiple layers of trauma and how those layers complicate the trauma for survivors.
DonWeitz, an antipsychiatry activist, our brother in Canada who is an insulin shock survivor, and a co-founder of the Coalition of Against Psychiatric Assault, offered such beautiful words about Bonnie and activities that they have been involved within Canada for decades, that I encourage you to read, in full. Weitz was clear and I agree wholeheartedly:
"All of us psychiatric survivors and our allies owe a debt of gratitude to Bonnie for the determination, courage, and brilliance that distinguish all of her work, and especially for creating this unique opportunity to expose and combat the psychiatric establishment from within academia.”
Simonet al. (2020) shared Bonnie’s own farewell to us:
"I love you, and my life has been enriched by what we have shared together,” she wrote. “I have thought of you often as the decades rolled by, usually with excitement, oh, so often with wonder and gratitude. What times we have had! Personally. In some cases, professionally. In some, communally. And what a mitzvah it has been to think, and talk, and hope, and dream, and disrupt, and create, and build, and tread together through time and space and meaning! Take care of the world. Shalom.”
On the University of Toronto OISE website, the Estate Of Bonnie Burstow can be found. Burstow began her career at the University of Toronto as a lecturer in 1968 and reached the status of Professor in 1995. At the time of Burstow’s passing, she was the Chair Admissions, Adult Education and Community Development Program in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education.
Burstow'scommitment to putting the concerns of psychiatric survivors first was so strong, OISE’s dedication page to Bonnie’s passing and writing of her Research Overview begins:
"Populationswith respect to and in alliance with whom Dr. Burstow did ongoing research include psychiatric survivors, people who are homeless, the imprisoned, undocumented populations, non-prescription drug users, and sex workers”.
BonnieBurstow truly was an amazing woman who left us a pathway for scholarships in antipsychiatry, violence against indigenous women, and research into Antisemitism at the University of Toronto.
· Dr.Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry
· Burstow'sScholarship for Research into Violence Against Indigenous Women: In Memory of Helen Betty Osborne
· BurstowScholarship for Research into Antisemitism
Onthe OISE page describing the Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry (2016) Bonnie was asked why this scholarship was “so important”. Burstow replied:
"Itis a historical breakthrough. While academics have been conducting antipsychiatry research for well over for half a century now, this is the very first time that an award of this nature is available. As such, it signals to the world that this field of inquiry has come of age”.
Inan interview with OISE about the Scholarship for Research into Violence Against Indigenous Women Burstow was asked why she created the endowment. Burstow explained:
"WhenI was a teenager in the 1950s I lived in the town of Churchill, Manitoba and at that time, about 90% of our neighbours were Indigenous. I witnessed first-hand the blatant racism against this group . . . As a faculty member in the social work department, I heard in vivid detail the violence and trauma that had been experienced by the students during their lives. The majority of my female students had been raped or sexually harassed, and many came from families whose children had been taken away from them by child welfare.”
Ina Canadian Jewish News (Lungen, 2019) interview, Burstow explains what she envisions appropriate study under the “perennial scholarship” for research on Antisemitism that she established in her name, with her own money and five community donors:
"All types of anti-Semitism research qualify for the award, including historical anti-Semitism, current anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism from the right, anti-Semitism from the left, religious-based anti-Semitism, secular anti-Semitism, general societal anti-Semitism, specifically academic anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism committed by communities with privilege and anti-Semitism committed by other oppressed communities.”
Evenwhen explaining why she put her own money toward these scholarships and wanted others to do the same, Burstow cautioned:
"Whenever you are endowing something that you want to ensure remains radical and does not descend into liberalism, there is always a fight.”
DoctorBonnie Burstow, Ph.D., certainly was amongst the most radical, trailblazing, non-stoppable forces. She found unique solutions to age-old problems. She talked the talk and led the walk. I am so grateful for the connections I have with Bonnie and the muck that she moved out of the way to do work, that very few others would allow.
Atweet from @OISEUofT reads:
"On January 24, join us for the launch of Dr. Bonnie Burstow's final book, "The Revolt Against Psychiatry," and help us say goodbye to our dear friend, colleague, and mentor. 5:30 p.m. in the Nexus Lounge. Please spread the word.”
The Revolt Against Psychiatry, Burstow’s (2019) final work is a collection of dialogues with activists, scholars, advocates, and psychiatric survivors who are working to hold psychiatry accountable for the fraud it perpetuates against people all over the world.
Morewill follow, as Bonnie’s prints are all over the human rights movement for people who are psychiatrized, drugged, shocked, institutionalized, at the hands of psychiatry. People are dying. Human rights violations are being committed at rampant rates all over the world. Please take some time to remember Dr. Bonnie Burstow, today, and whenever you are doing your work, and help us keep her visions.
Burstow was like a mythical creature to me, and when one day, more than a decade ago, I got to see her in action, at the psychOUT conference in Toronto, Canada, I knew that I had never met anyone like her before.
It was a day I knew there was hope for the antipsychiatry movement in the halls of the academy. Here was a woman who would not stop. She would rally people to stand with her. She would organize at levels that I do not even have access to in my thinking. One of the things that is most important for us to remember, I think, from being involved in this movement so long, and seeing what happens when people who have worked fearlessly, organizing and writing from an action-oriented base, is that sometimes their work disappears into the abyss.
Sometimes, it takes a year or two or more for the rest of us to really understand all they did, when there is no one there picking up what they had tirelessly committed their lives to doing.
So, in all ways possible, this is a piece to remember Bonnie Burstow, to grieve her loss, and to celebrate her work and life. This is to introduce Bonnie to those who did not know her and to beg us all to pick up, where we can Burstow’s work. If we all work at it, we can ensure that her life’s efforts are utilized as we go forward.
There is great sadness because I know how much Bonnie contributed to the field of antipsychiatry and the protection of the rights of people who experience oppression. I know that while she leaves a legacy of people that she has touched and connected, many of whom I never would have met without her as a center point, and whom I am so grateful to know, there will always only be one Doctor Bonnie Burstow.
Bustow had such foresight and concern for us as a movement that she devised ways to keep us in the academic tower, through the creation of scholarship, that even after her passing, will allow her work to live on. We have lost Bonnie Burstow, a mother of the antipsychiatry movement. It is up to us to follow her lead, to continue with brutal honesty in our inquiries, and fierce determination in our activism. Please get to know the work of Bonnie Burstow better, and employ it in all that you do.
Adam, S., Gold, E., Diamond, S., Kay, K., Varga, O. (January 16, 2020). In memoriam: Bonnie Burstow (1945-2020): The author, activist, and OISE professor was best known as an outspoken critic of psychiatry. Now Toronto. https://nowtoronto.com/news/in-memoriam-bonnie-burstow-antipsychiatry/
Giri, P. (2014/2019). Profile: Bonnie Burstow (1945-2020). In A. Rutherford (Ed.), Psychology’s Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive. https://www.feministvoices.com/bonnie-burstow/.
Universityof Toronto. (2020). Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She created, she wrote, she led: Honouring Professor Bonnie Burstow. Direct Your Gift. https://donate.utoronto.ca/give/show/271
