G Herbo in conversation on systemic racism and its links to PTSD
Written, Directed and Produced by: Talia Smith. Filmed by: Tim Toda
Post Traumatic Streets Disorder: When the State is the Abuser
America doesn’t just fail Black communities. It targets them.
What we call PTSD—Post Traumatic Streets Disorder—is not some mystery illness floating through the air. It is the direct, measurable, generational result of a system designed to destabilize, discredit, and displace Black people. The violence is not abstract. It is organized. It is funded. It wears badges, holds office, signs bills, and publishes curriculum.
This documentary—PTSD: Post Traumatic Streets Disorder—is not about broken people. It is about a broken contract. A government that wages war against the very communities it claims to serve. It is about young Black people speaking truth to the harm they inherited—not by accident, not by culture, but by design.
This Is What State Violence Looks Like
It doesn’t always show up in military gear or viral videos. Sometimes it signs a bill. Sometimes it drafts a zoning law. Sometimes it denies a loan. Sometimes it funds a school police department instead of a counselor.
Let’s be clear:
COINTELPRO, launched by the FBI, infiltrated, disrupted, and dismantled Black organizations—not because they were violent, but because they were powerful. Because they fed children. Because they taught literacy. Because they united people.
The so-called War on Drugs wasn’t a war on addiction. It was a war on Black political power. We know this from Nixon’s own advisor, who admitted: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be Black... but we could disrupt their communities.”
The school system has always served whiteness. Schools in Black neighborhoods are underfunded by design. Curriculum erases our history. Police presence replaces mentorship. Discipline replaces care.
Healthcare systems ignored Black maternal mortality rates, neglected sickle cell research, and experimented on our bodies without consent. This isn’t neglect—it’s policy.
And in every instance, when Black people organized to heal ourselves—through mutual aid, through spiritual leadership, through community control—we were targeted. Monitored. Criminalized. Undermined.
Trauma Is the Evidence—Not the Identity
What we call “trauma” in our communities is not proof of brokenness. It’s proof of resistance. It means we survived something. It means we carry memory in our bodies. And that memory has a name: displacement, disinvestment, surveillance, extraction, denial.
But it is critical that we say this: Blackness is not trauma. Blackness is not pathology. Blackness is not suffering.
What causes PTSD in Black communities is not who we are—but what we have been forced to endure at the hands of the state.
Our pain has been politicized.
Our resistance has been demonized.
Our healing has been criminalized.
And through all of it—we have remained alive, creative, strategic, spiritual, together. That is not dysfunction. That is genius.
What This Film Refuses
This film refuses to fall into the white media's voyeuristic lens.
Instead, Post Traumatic Streets Disorder frames trauma for what it really is: a symptom of war. A war against Black clarity. A war against Black joy. A war against Black sovereignty.
In conversation with G Herbo and Black youth across the country, we explore the deep psychological impact of growing up under constant surveillance and pressure. As documentation. As resistance. As memory work.
What Comes Next Must Be More Than Healing
Healing alone is not enough if the harm is still happening. We cannot meditate our way out of oppression. We cannot individual-therapy our way out of a system that is still poisoning water, still locking up our people, still stealing land, still lying in textbooks, still calling it democracy.
We need abolition—not just of prisons, but of the conditions that make them feel inevitable. We need investments in infrastructure, in truth-telling, in community ownership. We need to tell our own stories, on our own terms, without the need to soften the truth for mass appeal.
We owe that to those who came before us. We owe it to those coming next. More importantly, we owe it to ourselves.
What defines us is how we name it. How we organize around it. How we build futures in spite of it.
Post Traumatic Streets Disorder is not just a title. It’s a diagnosis of the state, not of our spirit. It is a record of survival. And a declaration: we will not carry this alone. We will speak, together. We will resist, together. We will remember, together.
And take down a broken system.
