By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer

Teah Hairston was given an assignment, literally and figuratively.

The now Dr. Hairston wrote her 2021 dissertation on the issue of Black women and mass incarceration and has made it her life’s work to support those impacted by it. She earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Missouri, but her education and exposure to the topic goes further back. Back to the days growing up in South Sacramento and seeing countless young men, including her older brother, getting repeatedly locked up.

Her mother, she says, introduced the concept of caring about the incarcerated.

“My mom was the person who I learned compassion from. My brother was in and out of prison. He started going to YA [Youth Authority] when he was 13 or 14,” Dr. Hairston recalls.

“That was my first real life experience with incarceration and what it feels like to have somebody in the house and then not in the house and then back in the house. The police would come to the house and our house was shot up before.”

The family moved a lot and Dr. Hairston attended elementary schools near Mack Road, G Parkway, Oak Park, Fruitridge and Elder Creek. All were heavily Black and low-income areas.

“That was all I saw, the boys around me going to jail or getting killed. Then people going to jail for the murders and all of those things coming together,” she says. “That was what was normal and common to me growing up. It wasn’t until I left for college that I was really trying to understand why this is our reality. Why am I not seeing this in everybody else’s community? Now that I’ve had a little bit more experience and a little bit more living, I know this is not happening in everybody else’s community. Why is this unique to us? That’s why I started studying African American history.”

She earned bachelor’s degrees in African American studies and psychology from San Jose State.

“I wanted to understand what was happening in our brains that was making us more apt or more inclined, or have this affinity,” she says. “What is it about us that leads us into these realities where our men, mostly our boys, are going to prison or getting killed?”

These were the same young men selling crack cocaine to her mother. Her mother is now healthy, happy, clean and sober and enjoying being a grandmother. But back then, her addictions impacted her family.

“My inquiries began with looking at my own house, looking at my own community and trying to understand this better,” Dr. Hairston says.

She came to the conclusion that white supremacy played a part in their circumstances.

“White supremacy and white superiority is why we are in the condition or why we live in the conditions that we live in,” she says. “They have created these conditions for us, unfortunately, and we have not yet arrived at the place and the point where we understand that we can take our power back. 

“With our enslavement and everything that happened afterwards, when we think about Jim Crow, when we think about the Freedmen’s Bureau, when we think about convict leasing, when we think about redlining – like all of those things have created the conditions for us to be in situations where we do have to take from one another, [or] we feel like we have to take from one another. When we feel like we have to commit violence against each other, where we’re having these disconnects in our relationships with one another.”

There’s also a level of personal responsibility.

“We have to acknowledge that that’s our work to do. We cannot keep blaming or looking at white people for the answers or the excuses,” Dr. Hairston says. “We have to look at ourselves, see where it is that we’ve been miseducated, been misunderstood, where we’ve had miscommunication. We have to unlearn all of those things. A lot of us are not in the position mentally or emotionally or even spiritually to do that. It takes a lot to really look at yourself and see where you’re f*cking up or where you’re at and where you can be better.”

Women And Children Bear The Weight

Dr. Hairston started her focus on Black women specifically in the incarceration space during her junior year at San Jose State. Her brother was in Folsom Prison at the time. His wife was also in and out of jail, she says.

“She was struggling with drugs and she had mental health challenges and stuff. So she wasn’t allowed to take the kids into the prison,” Dr. Hairston says. “She couldn’t come, she was banned. I had to take guardianship of my nieces, while [I was] still a college student, so that they would be able to see their dad.

“It made me feel a certain level of responsibility, a certain level of accountability. In a way, it was an honor to be that for him, to make sure that his daughters were able to see him. It was also quite a burden to be studying and working and drive from San Jose to Sacramento, to get the girls to be able to drive them all the way there. It was just a lot.”

Children can be left with scars dealing with incarcerated parents. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 47% of the approximately 1.25 million people in state prisons are parents of minor children. The impact can leave them with mental health and behavioral issues and increases their likelihood of winding up imprisoned themselves.

“That was one of the motivating factors for me to look at the impacts of mass incarceration on Black women in their lives because I was taking on all of that,” Dr. Hairston says.

Before researching vicarious incarceration and collateral consequences, she lived it.

She began volunteering with the Anti Recidivism Coalition and the Self Awareness and Recovery program. 

“All the spaces that took me into were filled with Black women,” she says. “We talked about incarceration and how all the brothers are gone. So all the women are the ones in the rooms, trying to talk about reform, reentry and reintegration and all of that. That’s when it hit me: this is what I need to be looking at. We already know what the brothers are going through; we know why. We know what they’re facing when they’re coming back. But what about the sisters who are left behind who really bear the brunt of all the consequences of their decisions? That’s when I was really like, ‘I want to look at Black women, I want to understand how Black women are dealing with this.’”

Women, she says, often neglect themselves to be the proverbial “ride or die.”

“We’re not taking care of ourselves. We are taking care of these brothers and these babies and communities and church members and clients, and students, we’re taking care of everybody but ourselves,” Dr. Hairston says. “So that’s what really made me interested in the topic and writing about it and digging deeper into it.

We’re In This Together

Some of the women Dr. Hairston interviewed for her dissertation developed health problems from the stress and anxiety of it all.

“For women, it’s doing time together, it’s just that you’re in there and I’m out here,” she says. “The collateral consequences are the extra stress that comes with now taking on the whole care of a child, if it was your husband or your baby’s father who went to prison. Now you’re taking care of the kids and without this person, without the extra support; there’s bills that they might leave behind, so now you’ve got to take care of not only your bills, but this person’s extra financial burden as well.

“One sistah was trying to get state jobs and they were looking at her whole background,” Dr. Hairston says. “Her brother was incarcerated, her cousin was incarcerated and her boyfriend was incarcerated and so she would get skipped over for those job opportunities because of her relation or proximity to people who were incarcerated.”

Dr. Hairston founded the Be Love Holistic LLC to empower and equip Black women in the pursuit of optimal health and well-being.

“We have to look at the whole woman. We have to understand our traumas,” she says. “We have to understand our relationships with one another, with our children, with our partners, with our careers and our jobs. We have to do all of that. With Be Love Holistic, I’m attempting to touch on all of those things as much as possible.”

Activities have included teaching women financial literacy, how to grow their own food and the importance of being physically fit. Participants also are connected to resources. Sometimes the resources are the other women in the workshop.

“We had a sister at one of our events, who was supporting someone who had a loved one incarcerated and that person was struggling to make her rent. Before we left the event, we raised $400 for that sister,” Dr. Hairston says.

“It’s just being with other Black women, as nurturers, as lovers, as teachers, as just all the things that we are. When we come together in numbers, it has been very easy for us to support.”

In addition to Be Love Holistic, Dr. Hairston serves as vice president of Safe Black Space, a nonprofit that creates healing spaces to help Black people deal with racial stress and trauma and engage in culturally relevant restorative practices. She is also the vice president of Sacramento Area Congregations Together (Sac ACT), a grassroots multi-faith organization dedicated to creating more just and equitable communities.

This week marks the tenth installment of OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow’s “Inside Out” series. Over the past few months, Barrow and others have highlighted the experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals and their families, looked at efforts to improve local jail and prison facilities, and shared the perspectives of Black correctional staffers and attorneys who work on change from within and activists who have dedicated their lives to shining a light on the inequities of the criminal justice system. We hope we’ve sparked conversation, self reflection and motivated people to action.