The Black Slum Child and the Problem of aggression Don

Working with black children who live in urban ghettos, I have been struck by the special nature of aggression in these children and how it works as a resistance to therapeutic efforts with them. Of course, there are many other problems presented by the socioeconomically deprived or ghetto child, but I have found it helpful to use aggression as a framework for understanding the resistance of these children to therapy. Although much of what follows applies to slum children of every race, the majority of black children live in deprived areas, and so these remarks have particular relevance for them.

First, let me define the term aggression as I will use it. The Oxford Dictionary emphasizes the concept of attack in defining the word, but for our purposes we can think of two types: benign aggression and malignant aggression. Benign aggression can be more specifically described as activity or assertiveness. It has a constructive quality. Malignant aggression is destructive and self-defeating. Usually it is expressed as sadism, rage, and violence. Black slum children, like all slum children, are exposed to a high degree of malignant aggression both in their family lives and in the life of their community. They are bombarded on all sides by forces that generate hostilities within them. In order to survive, they must develop techniques for dealing with this excessive aggressive stimulation. These techniques manifest themselves in the children's relationships to people, especially strangers and people of other races. It may be a form of paranoia or wariness, but it is self-preservative in nature, more akin to Freud's early idea on aggression, before he put the self-preservative function under the concept of Eros.

The black slum child's family setting involves exposure to violence and hostility from the moment of birth. His mother and father, themselves victims of deprivation, frustration, and prejudice, frequently get into overt physical fights in front of the children. Because