BLACK PAIN
It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting
By Terrie M. Williams
"As a young African-American male, you have to have your war face on at all times. It's all about maintaining your swagger. Some people like to run away from the uncut truth, but BLACK PAIN is no slouch. It boldly confronts the reality of our pain head on, flowing like hot lyrics over the perfect beat."
—Sean Combs
"We've never had a book this personal to read that defines our feelings and helps us understand what to do to heal ourselves. I'm proud of Terrie for writing BLACK PAIN so that everyone will finally recognize depression. As she puts it, "what it looks like, what it sounds and what it feels like."
—Mary J. Blige
Terrie Williams dares you to take off your game face! As a high-powered public relations pro, Terrie has worked with some of the biggest names out there, but all the success and power and access didn't spare her from profound emotional pain. And her own pain was too often mirrored in the lives of the hip hop and R&B artists, the producers, the dancers, and the music executives around her.
In her groundbreaking new book, BLACK PAIN: It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting (Scribner; January 8, 2008; $24),Terrie takes off the mask. She peels away the game face so many of us wear, and shows us that we don't have to hide our pain in shame. From celebrities like Mary J. Blige, DMX and Mike Tyson, Terrie talks to folks who know what it's like to struggle to keep it together day after day, when inside they feel like they're dying.
Before BLACK PAIN, we focused only on the symptoms of our pain: The rages, the arrests, the seesaw highs and lows. We saw every rapper on MTV Cribs build a shrine to Al Pacino's Scarface – a man so devastated inside that even having everything isn't close to enough. But worst of all, we've seen the murders, the senseless deaths, and the suicide-by-prison of our best and brightest. Our men are soldiers in an emotional war no one has named, and they are all too often fodder. They're suffering and dying on the front lines because no one has dared to name their pain.
It's time to open the steel door on our suffering and help each other heal. BLACK PAIN is a work no one in the entertainment industry should miss! No other book has looked so thoughtfully at how we as Black folks suffer emotionally, or in such accessible language. No other book has laid out a community crisis with such sensitivity, such empathy and such clear direction to solutions. BLACK PAIN doesn't just talk about depression – it tells you what depression looks, sounds and feels like. The next time you see a headline screaming that a favorite recording artist has been sent to rehab, arrested, or worse…—you'll see behind the mask of success to understand the pain that drives the self-destruction.
Terrie Williams is a woman on fire, and the fuel that keeps that fire raging is the epidemic of unacknowledged emotional pain in Black America. Depression is a catchword in the mainstream media, but among Black folks it might as well be "the D-word"—the shameful thing nobody talks about, even as it's killing us. But Terrie Williams is not afraid to talk about what "the blues" is doing to us and our loved ones— she's determined to get us all talking about it, and she will not rest until we can freely speak our pain without shame, and get to healing it! BLACK PAIN: It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting is her opening shot in that battle. Don't miss it!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A social worker by training, Terrie Williams launched the public relations firm, The Terrie Williams Agency, in 1988. The company quickly became one of the most successful PR firms in America, representing top names in entertainment, sports, business and politics such as Miles Davis, Johnnie Cochran, Stephen King, Eddie Murphy, HBO, and Time Warner. After surviving a profound depression, Terrie chronicled her struggle to regain her health in Essence magazine and the feedback was staggering. She continues her work with the agency and she also created the Stay Strong Foundation, which reaches out to anyone of any age suffering from mental illness. Terrie has a BA from Brandeis University and a master's degree in social work from Columbia University. She has one grown son and lives in New York City.
BLACK PAIN: It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting
By Terrie M. Williams
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
352 pages; $24.00
Contact: Mary Lengle
P. 610-285-4458
mary.lengle@madisonandco.biz
Cynthia Horner P 732 202-8246
cynthiamhorner@yahoo.com
