UNCG RESEARCH MAGAZINE

It was as if no one had ever asked him to tell his story.

Jocelyn R. Smith Lee, now an assistant professor of human development and family studies at UNC Greensboro, was interviewing a young man in Baltimore. It was part of her work as a doctoral research assistant, examining how young Black men transition from childhood to adulthood in communities where they’re disconnected from traditional school-to-work pathways.

“His interview went four hours, uninterrupted. Nobody got up. Nobody went to the restroom,” she says. “That really spoke to me about his need, and perhaps the larger need I was tapping into, of creating a space for the men to tell their stories.”

Unprompted, these interviews often turned into recitations of loss, violence, and negative encounters with law enforcement. Young men would describe to Smith Lee the friends, family members, and acquaintances who had been killed, sometimes by police.

Their stories revealed invisible wounds of trauma and grief among young Black males, a toll that has received almost no attention from researchers or the media, even as the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police has become a galvanizing issue.

Smith Lee aims to raise awareness of the trauma of Black boys and men who know those victims of violence through family ties or social connections, or who are victims themselves.

Their experiences, she says, are rarely reported.

Her work examines how violence affects the health, development, and family relationships of young Black men, and how current social policy has failed to take these experiences into account. It also seeks to center their voices, empowering them to tell their own stories and define their own narratives.

To be effective as a grief counselor, and to solicit the kind of detailed narratives she wanted as a researcher, Smith Lee had to establish rapport. She often began by sharing her own experiences.

“I would disclose to them that I had lost loved ones to violence in my life,” she says. “And even though I was a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, my neighborhood was not that different from theirs. And it helped to kind of bridge the gap, or defuse some assumptions about who I might be because of the educational trajectory I was on.”

Smith Lee also had to overcome the young men’s difficulty with identifying and expressing their feelings – a challenge reinforced by social mores that discourage them from expressing emotions, especially those related to pain and vulnerability.

She used the “How Are You Feeling Today?” chart, an educational and clinical tool that features drawn faces expressing 30 different emotions, to help the young men identify their feelings more precisely. Life history calendars helped the young men accurately recall important experiences from their lives, including the loss of friends and family members to violence.

“These traumatic losses are really developmental tasks that young men – and boys – are challenged to figure out as they progress to adulthood,” she explains.

The 40 young men she interviewed reported, on average, losing three loved ones to homicide, usually during their adolescent years. Most of the young men – 36 – also brought up, unprompted, the role of police encounters in their lives.

The innovative work Smith Lee and her collaborators are doing is critical for anyone interested in helping individuals overcome the effects of violence and in helping communities deconstruct the systems that create violence in the first place.

Researchers and policy makers are increasingly exploring concepts such as adverse childhood experiences – or ACEs – to understand how social circumstances, such as poverty or living in a particular neighborhood, can affect education and health outcomes over a lifetime. But, Smith Lee says, research on ACEs and even post-traumatic stress doesn’t fully account for the burden carried by the Black boys and men she works with.

To be effective, she says, social policy and reform also need to account for systemic racism and white supremacy, which has shaped communities, policing, education, and other societal institutions for generations.

Her work, she hopes, will help change that.

“I’ve always held the dream in my heart of developing some kind of center that would become a nexus of research policy and practice that’s related to trauma, violence, and healing for Black families,” she says.

“I would love to see the work trigger, or lead to, investments in the lives of young Black men that mirror the level of adversity that they are navigating.”