To:
Minnesota Department of Human Rights
Phone: (651) 539-1100
Email: mdhr@state.mn.us
Address: 625 Robert St N, St Paul, MN 55155
From:
[Your Full Name]
[Your Address]
[Your Email]
[Your Phone Number]
Date: August 16, 2025
Subject: Complaint of Discriminatory and Harmful Language by the Office of African American Health (OAAH)
Dear Minnesota Department of Human Rights,
I am submitting this formal complaint against the Office of African American Health (OAAH) for the use of discriminatory, offensive, and harmful language on their website and in their public materials. Specifically, the OAAH has employed the term “Post Traumatic Slave Disorder,” which I find deeply inaccurate, degrading, and harmful to Black Minnesotans and the broader African American community.
It is historically and factually incorrect to reduce the Black experience to the label of “slavery,” and the continued use of the deceitful term "slave," which is not only psychologically damaging but socioeconomically damaging, as it allows society to see me as such and, as a result, legally and socially value me as such, creating continued obstacles for Black Minnesotans. Moreover, it obstructs the current reality of what "slavery" is meant to imply and that is legal abuse.
Understanding Slavery in Actuality vs. Racially Fueled Rhetoric
For context, we as Minnesotans should be aware that the U.S. Civil War, which rebranded and restructured "slavery" to incarceration through the 13th Amendment and recognized birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment, was a Minnesota war. It occurred as a result of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's response to our own Mr. Dred Scott, of the Fort Snelling, Minnesota legal case, in which the Supreme Court expressed its opinion:
Paraphrasing: That it was good that there were "no rights of a Black man that a white man was bound to respect", and that all Blacks — slaves as well as free — were not, and "could never become", citizens of the United States, and therefore "should not seek justice" from the courts.
Now, that's not a matter of slavery. It's a lawsuit. That lawsuit delivered an unjust decision, which sparked a national revolt, which blossomed into a war five years later and was won by former captives—resulting legislation that deemed kidnapping, trafficking and holding captives as illegal, with the 14th Amendment.
That did not abolish enslavement or end captivity, because the issue of "enslavement" was not one of location but of freedom and equality, which can only be gained one of two ways in this nation: law or war.
My people tried the former but were forced to stand on the latter. They were not slaves in reality, and Mr. Scott was not in legality.
Slavery was not legally sanctioned in this jurisdiction. It is debatable whether Mr. Scott was trafficked here or got himself here—because he's not alive to tell the story. But I know one thing, as a "captive" myself, it's that I'm the only one keeping me alive. So Mr. Scott should be afforded the credit for keeping himself alive. And he made himself a free man by geographical location. He was not a slave in Fort Snelling by law. He was not a slave when he filed that lawsuit by law. He was a captive because the law withheld the citizenship documentation he was entitled to in his northern location(s), illegally.
Now, as a legal citizen of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, USA, Mr. Scott did what "freemen" do—he petitioned the court for his formal "citizenship papers." He was denied, and as a result, there was war and acute liberation for all Black people nationally from the open force of residing in white-owned plantations—housing and living conditions as free people.
Withholding Documents to Control Housing Location and Living Conditions
The issues Dred Scott faced in 1857 are the exact issues I face today. On February 28, 2019, Dakota County Community Development Agency withheld my 19-year good-standing Housing Choice Voucher moving papers to stop me from getting out of Minnesota in an effort to conceal their hand in sixteen years of maltreatment and abuse that crippled my body forever and continues to destroy my body into the third generation—associated with the 2015 billion-dollar class action lawsuit against DHS for withholding Medicaid funds. Why they did it isn't important here. It was done.
The penalty I have paid for escaping illegal, reported, maltreatment and abuse at the hands of the state was, firstly, 1,775 days of forced homelessness—where everything was done to me and taken from me—and still, I am the victim of sexual harassment in housing today.
Minnesota Racial Covenant – 2019
In 2019, Twin Cities Public Television produced a documentary called "Jim Crow of the North," with a historical focus on the inappropriate, inaccurate, and limiting term "Racial Covenants" that barred Black and "undesirable" (disabled) Minnesotans from owning homes in Minneapolis.
That's not what they were—they were "housing covenants." The subject is housing, not race. By inappropriately terming them racial covenants, a legal loophole was created for racially motivated "housing covenants" to be disguised as other covenants. So, now the issue persist in present day without an easily understandable and identifiable framework.
And with the way Minnesota likes to look to historical records to express what they know full well is happening now—without ever mentioning what is happening now—they inadvertently desensitize and further occult systemic issues that Black Minnesotans can only surmount in two ways: law or war.
Language is 90% of the battle.
Previous to the outright theft of my Housing Choice Voucher through the federal agency—as expressed in the documentary—Dakota County came together and passed legislation that Minnesota renters who qualify for Section 8 and waiver medical insurance could not rent in the cities or West or South Saint Paul. This was directed at me specifically for years of whistleblowing on their partners at DHS, before, during, and after the $1 billion dollar lawsuit—damage control. That missed.
So did five attempts to terminate my voucher under false accusations in one year, after submitting my notice to move out of state—while they ignored that notice until caught red-handed by an inspector. All those illegal attacks missed.
I'm not going to go into further detail as part of this complaint. I provide this context to clearly "define," with local examples, what slavery is—for a collection of individuals who, rather than doing the research with a commitment to advancement and improvement, took the quick way out, fast way up, throwing anything they identified by color and popularity up, when they're a government organization receiving public funds for a mission that obligates the education and commitment or your just another part of the problem.
If I have to drag this, over egotism, in a system funded to serve me, I'm more than happy to provide research to prove my point for every decade since the Dred Scott from case all across this nation. I graduated on that, right before I played a pivotal role in making Minneapolis the city in the Midwest to mandate a working wage minimum of $15.00—and after my specific strategy moved Hennepin County to refrain from the use of a grand jury in the case of Jamar Clark.
I don't speak on everything, but when I speak, I have spoken—and my information is correct. I'm not into ego, and I'd rather not meet the mandate of health performance because I am extremely sick and marginalized due to ongoing crime, which falls under the Office of African American Health's jurisdiction.
I'm not about to allow my own people to use my degrading position as cash exchange to further their identity away from mine based on income—when systemic racism, and the resulting medical disabilities and high mortality it causes, are an identity shared with every person in this American democracy, whether they like it or not. These are not me problems and I do not subscribe to pretending they are any longer simply because that is what society expects of me. "We, Americans in the USA, have work to do." I'm not about to let that go.
Now, while I used my own local examples, what I experience — what every African American experiences, from the billion-dollar Kanyes, million-dollar Kyries, to the homeless men of Ramsey County — is "legal abuse," which no American population has been victim of in comparison to African Americans from the beginning to now. And nowhere is it as severe as in the state of Minnesota, which can result in "Legal Abuse Syndrome" (LAS), a set of psychological symptoms that makes it extremely difficult to advocate for oneself.
"Surprisingly, Minnesota is also putatively one of the worst places for blacks to live. Measured by racial gaps in unemployment rates, wage and salary incomes, incarceration rates, arrest rates, home ownership rates, mortgage lending rates, test scores, reported child maltreatment rates, school disciplinary and suspension rates, and even drowning rates, African Americans are worse off in Minnesota than they are in virtually every other state in the nation. The simultaneous existence of Minnesota as the best state to live in, but the worst state to live in for blacks, is the crux of 'The Minnesota Paradox.' — Professor Samuel L. Myers Jr., Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
Now, how are current victims of legal abuse going to get out of that abuse without the ability to advocate for themselves, without legal recourse to advocate for them, and still carry the burden of people not comprehending why they are how they are — and have no means of psychotherapy because the average therapist is not trained or educated in the post-traumatic stress of systemic racism, which is held intact by legal abuses, i.e., prevailing, unwritten Roger B. Taney codes of conduct?
In a democracy where law is the only protection, those without it are captives. And when they don’t have the right to their own reputation, identity, narratives, protection of their body and their property — where anyone can violate them as long as they’re the right color — that is a system of enslavement. Yet, that does reduce them to 3/5 of a human being: “slave,” for the benefit of cunning Willie Lynch "controlled language" of criminals who intend to continue victimizing.
While I genuinely respect Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary, and have for a long time, enjoyed her lectures. I am not slave and I am not suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome in an impactful way and neither are the other rational Black Minnesotans that are fighting to stay alive in the 90% racial wealth gap. Though I cannot speak for those that enjoy that $17,600.00 income, with economic luxury, of getting in touch with the cellular memory of their ancestors time on the plantation with PTSS. The Minnesota Office of African American Health is funded for the objective of identifying and resolving health disparities among black Minnesotans—me.
We need a language for today. A language for the legal abuse responsible for our condition right now, our barriers right now, for what the disparity is in actuality, in every case, its economically and racially motivated legal abuse. I have Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS)—with measurable symptoms affecting Activities of Daily Life (ADL's).
I need professional space in psychology to unpack and process it with informed therapist. Society needs to confront the long-term post-traumatic effects of the systematic racism and social injustice i.e. crimes they're perpetuating and pretending are happening so they can learn to leave a less harmful footprint on black Americans because they don't have that education.
They have been indoctrinated in system that calls for them to behave injuriously and frame the injuries that they cause, as a "me problem"—a black problem, a slave burden, a historical problem of their white ancestors which I should just get over because they have the luxury of white privilege to get over it; anything to remove themselves from accountability for their actions today.
Many uniformed Black Americans, resigned to being a product of environment, support this continued negative impact with their language and competition among one another—which comes from the Willie Lynch doctrine that is indisputably baked into Minnesota culture. And maybe, they also haven't had the education on how control is fundamentally built on a foundation of language.
I am not resigned to be a product of environment, I want to experience the freedom to build my own environment without systemic intrusion. Its my constitutional, self-evident, inalienable birthright to self-determined, life liberty and pursuits of happiness.
In a land ruled by law, either law enforcement grants me the right to do it by protecting me from unlawful attacks, I become enemy of the law for asserting my rights without legal support, I carry on as slave being a product of my environment, eating what tax-funded public welfare feeds me in the environment they create—complaining about my condition like an infant because I apply no legitimate effort to improve the societal institution of legal abuse that enslaves me, die or war. These are not 21st Century options, these are the options of our ancestors and still the options which we are systematically limited to in the 21st century, whilst our white, indigenous and immigrant counterparts are not and society silences it all with dishonest terms like "disparities" where actionable criminality should be.
That portion is for context.
The truth, Black people were captives subjected to brutal conditions. The trauma suffered by Black Americans—including acts such as kidnapping, human trafficking, physical violence, psychological torment, rape, death and slave labor—is a legacy of ongoing Black Holocausts, but none of us today are slaves or trafficked captives of the U.S.A. This language of PTSS perpetuates a false narrative and echoes the same triggering, marginalizing, divisive, degrading rhetoric used by enslavers to control perception for their own economic and behavioral benefit.
Furthermore, after I contacted the OAAH requesting assistance regarding a criminal issue making me sick, and in it, I urged assistance with getting Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS) added to the DSM with a foundation of Systematic Racism and Social Injustice—a more appropriate framework to address systemic legal abuse and racial injustice for the benefit of Black Minnesotans. The OAAH ignored my report of medically injurious crime and assistance with getting LAS in the DSM. Only after this unresponsiveness to my request, did the OAAH add the offensive term “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” to their website, in the most ghetto form of Willie Lynch competition which can only be found in black educational and business spaces, instead of engaging constructively with my concerns as a member of the population which they are established to serve, coming to them for help.
This action by the OAAH represents a failure to respect the dignity and rights of Black Minnesotans and contributes to systemic discrimination. It also contradicts principles of honesty, accuracy, and transparency that should govern organizations serving marginalized communities.
I request that the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigate this matter promptly, require the immediate removal of this harmful racial language of "slave syndrome" from OAAH’s public materials, which would lead the public to believe their demographics are slaves, suffering a post traumatic syndrome responsible for current health disparities among Black Minnesotans, rather than the legal abuse they experience currently as Black Minnesotans and ensure that such discriminatory practices are not perpetuated by government offices in our state.
If corrective action is not taken, I will be forced to escalate this issue to other offices and media outlets, along with documentation of my attempts to resolve multiple issues with the tax-payer funded OAAH.
Black Minnesotans deserve responsive, advocacy free from degrading and misleading language. I trust your office will take this complaint seriously and act accordingly.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
[Your Full Name]
[Your Contact Information]
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