GABRIELLE UNION WENT TO THERAPY TWICE THIS WEEK

Gabrielle Union was a panelist for a mental health discussion on “Citizen Verizon Assembly: Education is not up for Debate”, a streaming event sponsored by Verizon, Yahoo’s parent company.

Video Transcript

GABRIELLE UNION: We really realized how important our village is during this crisis. And so we moved my mom, and my mom has-- had adopted three kids, so there's a 13-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old, and my niece to help, and we move Dwayne's mom out from Chicago. We have Claudia James, who's a little under 2 years old. We have Zaya who's 13, you know, my husband, my little sister, so we have a house full.

And all of us are coping and having different kind of challenges that all manifest in different ways. With Zaya, you know, having to deal with know remote learning, it's a challenge, because, you know, everyone in this household is working. So there's constant noise. There's constant distraction, so just finding time to focus, having silence, being able to, you know, to get that work done. Anxiety, you know, is sky-high in general, but when you add in a global pandemic, this racial reckoning that is happening, you know, in every facet of life, the stress, the anxiety, you know, for everyone has been pretty consistent and pretty intense.

I don't think people understand what it is like to see the daily barrage of the brutalization of black and brown bodies, bodies that look like yours, and what that does to a child. I mean, what that does to all of us, but specifically to black and brown children, making, trying to make sense of the anti-blackness, trying to make sense of racism. We don't even have the language correct. You know, we talk about microaggressions, when those aggressions are anything but small or insignificant. Those, those microaggressions hit like a Mack truck, and I don't think anyone's ever really given us any kind of data or research about the lasting impact of racism, the trauma, the harm caused.