For Archie Green, rapping was a way of combating the depression, anxiety, and trauma he faced behind closed doors. After recognizing how music can serve as an emotional outlet, Green launched a Cleveland-based nonprofit called Peel Dem Layers Back (PDLB) back in 2016.
PDLB exists to help usher in "a world where Black men and Boys can creatively cope with trauma, positively express emotions and foster community with others through healthy relationships with self, partner, family and protective relationships with the world," and there are various different programs within this nonprofit.
One of these programs is dubbed Cope Dealers, and it's described as "a 10-week comprehensive mental health awareness workshop designed to address areas of mental health impacting the African American males and offering practical ways to cope with daily stressors."
The initiative, funded through outside donors, begins with high school teachers and counselors identifying upper-level students who could benefit from a mental health-focused program. Participants then analyze lyrics that touch on subjects like depression and anxiety before creating their music in a recording studio.
Simultaneously, the teens also work with a social worker to further address their mental health challenges.
"Basically, [we] help them process what they've heard and what they learned in this album and in the various scenes in the movie that are tied to trauma, tied to PTSD, anxiety, grief, dismantling white supremacy," Green stated.
"We're just now starting to have this conversation become more normalized because for so long the stigma that's across all races, generations were very prominent in the Black community," he continued. "That translated eventually to us just being strong and taking in flipping pains of racism. So now, for the first time in two, three generations, we're now finally giving ourselves permission to feel."
"We're shifting the paradigm—we're Black men, but we are human first," Green added.
The Cope Dealers program currently has 8 participants from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio, though Green is now expanding to other high schools. Upon the students' completion of the program in March, they'll each have made their own very own mixtape. Additionally, the participants will perform their tracks at a school concert later this year.
