There’s a price we pay for failing to address the growing divide between races. The highest price is not paid by adults, however, but by children.
That price is often emotional, mental, psychological, physical, and financial as they deal with divisions in their families, incarceration of parents, and growing up years spent bouncing from home to home or foster family to foster family.
Adverse Childhood Events are situations that children face which have been identified as so traumatic that the impact on the child not only lasts a lifetime, but can be passed down to the next generation. The more of these events that take place in a child’s life, the higher the risks are of poor mental and emotional outcomes — such as suicide or being drawn into criminal activity — later in life, and the higher the risk for their own children, as well.
Bullying and discrimination based on race or ethnicity are two of these events. When combined with other adverse events, such as a parent who is jailed, living in an unsafe neighborhood, experiencing food shortages, physical or emotional neglect, parental separation or divorce, it can create a lethal cocktail of mental, emotional, psychological, and physical health problems that leave families in financial ruin and poverty.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change things. First, though, we have to talk about it. We have to be willing to hold open and honest conversations about the issues surrounding race. The current ways of holding racial conversations, where we talk about each other rather than to each other, aren’t easy. The results won’t be immediate.
Human beings have a tough time changing because they first have to understand what they are doing to contribute to the problem, then see why the change that they’re being asked to make is essential to improving things, and then believe that making those changes is in their best interest. It can take many conversations before a breakthrough is made. Patience is required.
Path To Publishing isn’t content to sit on the sidelines waiting while the next generation of children pay the price for the silence, the divisions, and the failures of current leadership to step up and own responsibility for fixing the problems. We didn’t create the problems but we will take responsibility for doing our part to solve them.
That’s why we’re crowdfunding a movement designed to bridge the gap between the races. The money raised will be used to fund the publication of The Price We Pay,dubbed the To Kill a Mockingbird of the 21st Century but from the Black point of view, the debut novel of a young Black author. It is being published on our traditional publishing imprint, PTP Press.
Discover more about our novel approach to changing the conversation around race relations by visiting our crowdfunding campaign page: https://ptppress.com/taking-a-novel-approach-to-change. While you’re there, sign up to #JoinTheConversation and support our efforts to open the doors to honest, thoughtful conversations that can produce conversions of heart and mind.