--- title: Trigger Guard date: 2021-01-15T17:02:00-05:00 author: University of Maryland canonical_url: "https://terp.umd.edu/trigger-guard" section: Articles --- # Trigger Guard *January 15, 2021* — by [Liam Farrell](/authors/liam-farrell) - *Photo by John T. Consoli* > Crossing the boundaries between academia and the streets, Professor Joseph Richardson Jr. seeks to find a way out of trauma for young Black men. *Joseph Richardson Jr.* **AN AUGUST EPISODE** of the podcast “[Life After the Gunshot](https://open.spotify.com/show/5aHbvX6mu8FomGQexFTRly)” starts with two brash personas, but any artifice quickly fades. “DocJoRich,” the host, shouts out to protesting NBA players, advocates for the arrest of the Louisville police officers who shot Breonna Taylor and asks listeners to support Black businesses. “Young Fre$h,” his guest, is an aspiring rapper from southeast D.C., calling in from the passenger seat of a moving car. *Richardson, left, talks with Chris Edge, center, and Che Bullock, a senior violence intervention specialist. — Richardson, left, talks with Chris Edge, center, and Che Bullock, a senior violence intervention specialist. Edge, aka “Young Fre$h,” is an aspiring D.C. rapper who met the pair after getting shot while trying to prevent his family’s eviction. (Photo by John T. Consoli)* --- **DOCJORICH GREW UP** as JoJo in the northwest Philadelphia neighborhoods of East Mount Airy and East Germantown as they transitioned in the 1970s from predominantly Jewish to lower middle-class African American families. Richardson’s father, a well-known jazz vocalist who bequeathed both his name and nickname to his son, worked in a Sears warehouse, and his mother was a public schoolteacher who used to take him to her night classes at Temple. *Richardson records interviewee — Richardson is chronicling the stories of 10 gun violence survivors in a new documentary series. (Photo courtesy of Joseph Richardson Jr.)* --- **THE FIRST TIME** Che Bullock met Richardson in 2013, he was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a .40-caliber handgun. At the time, that was Bullock’s standard routine. Active in drug dealing, the southeast D.C. native had been stabbed 13 times during a nightclub fight and flown by helicopter to the hospital. When Richardson’s project partner, postdoctoral researcher Chris St. Vil, called afterward to ask if Bullock would be part of a new project, he understandably hesitated. “I didn’t know if he was police, or an enemy trying to set me up,” Bullock says. *Inset 3 — Richardson and Bullock stand with Majhe Powers, center, at his high school graduation. The pair was devastated when Powers, who had completed vocational training and been accepted to community college, was killed in southeast D.C. in 2019. (Photo courtesy of Joseph Richardson Jr.)* --- **AS A BLACK MAN** with a strong command of urban culture, from the latest music news to a longtime boxing fandom, Richardson is positioned better than lots of academics to cross over from a university into a community like southeast D.C. and come away with information. The young men he works with affectionately address him as “Doc,” providing the first part of his podcast moniker. But that basic identity only goes so far in neighborhoods where all outsiders are treated with suspicion, and Anacostia differs from Harlem in its particulars just like Harlem differs from northwest Philadelphia. “You don’t necessarily get a pass into that space,” Richardson says. “Some things you understand, but a lot of things you don’t.” That philosophy gives Richardson the strength and ability to search for answers in places that most scholars avoid, says Ruth Enid Zambrana, a distinguished university professor in UMD’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a mentor of Richardson. He unearths not just the weaknesses in poor Black neighborhoods, but also the strengths—like his research on the importance of uncles for inner-city Black youth—and “has really broken the boundaries of the field,” she says. “He is treading water that no one else has dared to go in,” Zambrana says. Richardson has gone full circle now, and continues violence intervention efforts at the same Baltimore program started by Cooper at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. Two related projects are in the pipeline as well, including a four-part documentary series based on interviews with 10 trauma victims he met through his work in Prince George’s County. He envisions it forming the basis of a show similar to HBO’s iconic “The Wire,” blending the stories of individuals with the criminal justice, neighborhood and medical situations that shape their lives. The other is a joint effort with two colleagues from the UMD School of Public Health, Associate Professors Craig Fryer and Kevin Roy, with support from the university’s Brain and Behavior Initiative. By recruiting and interviewing Black men from local barbershops, the UMD Center for Healthy Families and the Prince George’s trauma unit, the team will study how the subjects understand their own traumatic experiences, the health impacts of race-related stress, and strategies for building resilience. “Joe really brings this strong background in sociology and criminal justice … (and) how to think about systems and how they interact with the lives of Black men,” Fryer says. “They are quite diverse, and there is no such thing as ‘the Black male.’ There’s much more richness to who they are.” The work remains urgent as COVID-19 and its attendant economic fallout continues to wreak disproportionate havoc on minority populations, with the homicide rate spiking in cities including Washington, D.C. (“People going crazy ’cause they been in the house,” Edge told Richardson on his podcast. “Since March, my city been turned up to a whole ’nother level.”) Richardson, however, needs no reminders of the wages of gun violence, either personally or professionally. Just two years ago, his best friend, a married father and attorney, killed himself with a gun; and in November 2019, one of his documentary subjects, Majhe Powers, was murdered. A primary caregiver for his siblings and recent graduate of the Run Hope Work vocational training program, Powers, 21, had also been accepted to community college when police found him with gunshot wounds in the hallway of a southeast D.C. house. When he saw the body of someone he tried to save in a casket, Richardson says, he couldn’t help but also feel accountable—just as he feels accountable for the violence meted out daily in communities struggling with poverty, drugs, guns and the institutional disconnect that too often leaves helping hands out of reach. “As a Black male professor, you can’t really separate yourself,” he says. “The work that we do is very life-and-death.” **TERP** **Issue:** [Winter 2021](https://terp.umd.edu/editions/winter-2021) **Types:** [Features](https://terp.umd.edu/category/features)