Wrong Place, Wrong Time

by John A. Rich

Medical school taught John Rich how to deal with physical trauma in a big city hospital but not with the disturbing fact that young black men were daily shot, stabbed, and beaten. This is Rich's account of his personal search to find sense in the juxtaposition of his life and theirs. Young black men in cities are overwhelmingly the victims -- and perpetrators -- of violent crime in the United States. Troubled by this tragedy -- and by his medical colleagues' apparent numbness in the face of it -- Rich, a black man who grew up in relative safety and comfort, reached out to many of these young crime victims to learn why they lived in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and how it affected them. The stories they told him are unsettling -- and revealing about the reality of life in American cities. Mixing his own perspective with their seldom-heard voices, Rich relates the stories of young black men whose lives were violently disrupted -- and of their struggles to heal and remain safe in an environment that both denied their trauma and blamed them for their injuries. He tells us of people such as Roy, a former drug dealer who fought to turn his life around and found himself torn between the ease of returning to the familiarity of life on the violent streets of Boston and the tenuous promise of accepting a new, less dangerous one. Rich's poignant portrait humanizes young black men and illustrates the complexity of a situation that defies easy answers and solutions.

233 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 11, 2009

About the author

John A. Rich, MD, MPH, is Professor and Chair of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health. He has been a leader in the field of public health, and his work has focused on serving one of the nation's most ignored and underserved populations--African-American men in urban settings. In 2006, Dr. Rich was granted a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
For more information about Dr. Rich's work, please visit www.wrongplacewrongtime.org"

Reviews

[Bri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether we are walking down the street or interacting with someone through a professional setting, we all have implicit bias that is shaped by media, readings, and our own experiences. This book challenges the way that implicit bias operates in the health care setting specifically about young black and brown men who have been injured by violence. Through unpacking and following a few men from their experience in healthcare, to recalling what landed them in the hospital, through how they maneuvered the world after, all offer ideas that challenge the narrative that all victims of violence brought it on their selves. One powerful quote that resonated from one of the personal stories was " it's a hell of alot harder being good than being bad."

Although the young men did not directly make specific connection, the book illuminates that ways that there are a host of structural and environmental factors that contribute to these outcomes. From a public health lens, one program or intervention is not a sufficient blanket the solution but treating victims of violence from the perspective that the are in need of healing and support rather than to be seen and treated as the stereotypes that society tells us black and brown men are, monsters.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To the extent that we maintain the idea that these young men are unreasonable, we can fear them. But when we understand that out of their collective trauma and the conditions of the social environment in which they live there emerges an underlying logic of physical and emotional survival, it can change us."

[David Tybor · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you haven't watched The Wire, listened to a lot of Clipse, read Tyson's Autobiography, and earned an MPH degree, then you might learn a lot from this book.