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Racial trauma is real

Just imagine, every day you are poised for something bad to happen.  You may not be conscious of the tension, but it’s there. You’re primed for fight or flight. That’s a part of what it’s like to be Black in America.

Sometimes you’re just ready for someone to follow you in a store thinking you’re a thief or for someone to make a disparaging comment about a section of town or to offer the backhanded compliment (microaggression) of how articulate you are. But often you’re waiting for the next big shoe to drop.

I’ve been tense, expecting something bad – some racially motivated event — since 2012, the year that Trayvon Martin was killed.  The catalyst wasn’t just Trayvon Martin, it was the series of lost lives that came after his, but there is no doubt that Trayvon Martin was my ground zero. I experienced his death personally, viscerally. It was hard for me to read the news or watch the coverage. My son and Trayvon were born 364 days apart. When I learned of Trayvon’s birthday and the normalcy of that evening when he was killed, I immediately connected my son and Trayvon. My son could have been walking home from the grocery store near our home. Nothing but time, space, and fate caused this to happen to Trayvon and not my son. 

While incidents of violence against Black people, especially boys, and men, have always been known and discussed in the Black community, it wasn’t until the years immediately following Trayvon’s murder that we started to regularly see the images. Suddenly, video cameras were everywhere – home and business security cameras, police body cameras and just citizens with their phones. We weren’t only hearing about tragedies; we were watching them, a lot of them, one after another.  

Imagine, for example, watching violence happen routinely to women with blonde hair. If you were a blonde woman, maybe you’d choose to wear a wig or dye your hair until the source of the violence was discovered and addressed. As a member of this subset of the white community — blonde and female — you would probably feel confident that the source of the violence would be identified quickly and taken care of. 

Photo by Julian Myles, Unsplash

Now, imagine you are a Black man or boy. You cannot and don’t want to camouflage your skin color or race. The causes of much of the violence you face are already known – racism, prejudice, ignorance, and fear. Unlike the anticipated response to the blonde women, there isn’t a widespread effort to address the causes of violence against the Black community. In fact, some want to ignore the causes, like the response to teaching the entirety of our country’s racial history. Or the response takes an inordinate time (anti-lynching legislation was first introduced in Congress in 1918 and passed over one hundred years later in 2020 following the televised “lynching” of George Floyd). So, there’s little to make the Black community think this violence/ trauma will end.

I don’t live in fear for myself, primarily because of my age and my gender, but I do live in fear for my son. He assures me that he isn’t afraid. I hear him, but I believe he carries this fear with him every day, subliminally. He knows that his physical presence alone is causing some white woman to fear him and to know that she can call the police and say a Black man is threatening her and be believed.

This feeling of being in danger or having a loved one in danger is constant for most Black people. It may not be at the surface of one’s day to day life, but it’s there. According to all that I read, living with stress – and this fear certainly causes stress, acknowledged or unknown — contributes to high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, all conditions in which Black people are disproportionately represented. 

A few days ago, I was watching the evening news with three friends, two of us were Black, two were white. The anchor began to discuss the death of a Black man, Keenan Anderson, after he was tasered by Los Angeles police officers. The video came on. I averted my eyes. Every time I see another incident, the fear for my son increases. The other Black person in the room didn’t watch either. I guess we’ve both seen enough. We can’t watch the inhumanity against Black people any longer, but I’m glad that our white friends watched. While the images cause me pain, they have revealed our reality to many in white America. But, must our continued pain and death be necessary to open eyes, hearts and minds to the need for change?

NOTE: This post was written before the murder of Tyre D. Nichols in Memphis. 

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A Milestone: Time to Reflect

I’ve written this blog for five years. You’re reading the 82nd entry. Some have garnered a great deal of interest. Others, not so much.

“Why would anyone care what I’m experiencing or what I think? Is anyone reading this stuff?” I’ve often wondered.

And, on particularly hard days, I think, “Is focusing so much on racism making me feel sad and angry?”  Life can be swayed by too many negative emotions.

In those moments, I decide it’s time to quit.

“Five years is a good endpoint,” I tell myself, firmly decided.

Then I pause and reflect.  The news, not historical documentaries, the daily evening news, along with 24,7 streamed headlines, thrusts me back into current reality. That’s when I know.  I must keep at it.

Racial bullying continues. Governors and school superintendents don’t want the complete history of our country taught. Inaccuracy is preferred, at least, preferred by some.  And, structures are still in place providing preferential treatment to white people.  There’s a lot of misinformation and ignorance about race, racism, and what it means to be Black in America.

It was 2017 when I started writing this monthly blog. At first, it was connected to my book by the same name. All the early posts related to the decades-long, racially underpinned experiences I’d had along with my female friends, the “daughters” of the dream. I was simply sharing glimpses of our racial reality.

Over time, the posts have evolved. While my friends are featured periodically and sometimes, I focus on our youthful experiences in Richmond, Virginia, it is more about my reflections as an adult, as a Black woman in America.

Based on interactions with white friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, I know, for example, many think my experience is the same as theirs. This seems to be particularly true if they think we share a similar educational background, financial means, and professional status or because we’re both women. I can understand why they might think that, but it’s not true. None of those factors makes a difference.

No one knows, or perhaps cares (or should care), about my education, finances, or profession when they see me on the street or in a store. What they absolutely know for sure is that I’m Black.  From that one piece of information,  certain assumptions are made, assumptions that are often founded in untruths.

There continues to be an invisibility to racism, a lack of understanding of the depth, breadth and impact of structural racism and implicit bias and, basically, a lack of understanding of what it means to be Black in America. This is what keeps me writing. Maybe one person will have an aha moment that leads them to open the mind of someone else and then someone else.

While I know that some choose to be uninformed or to believe in a skewed, untrue sense of America’s racial reality, I believe that others haven’t been exposed and that if educated, they would be on the side of justice, racial justice. I hope to be a part of that education.

So, here’s my goal. I want to help non-Black people see the America that I experience every day. I want to prompt reflections on what may be a new insight, to promote reading and learning about race and racism, and to urge more people to be a part of the push for racial justice. I’m not Pollyanna. I don’t think of myself as naive.  This process won’t be easy and it certainly hasn’t been quick, but I choose to be hopeful. I believe that information matters, that knowledge can lead to individual behavior change and, ultimately to societal transformation. I’m just one, small part of that ongoing, necessary swirl of information about race and racial justice.

If you think it’s worth a 4-minute read once a month (or so), become a follower (maybe even read some of the earlier posts), pass it on to a friend, a family member, or a co-worker and encourage them to learn more. We all have so much to learn — and to unlearn — as we work in 2023 — and beyond —  for a racially just America.

Happy New Year.

 

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Two brown girls

Is watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade a tradition in your family? It is in mine. As a child, on Thanksgiving morning, we’d drive across town to visit my maternal grandmother. After being greeted by her big hug and the wonderful smells of dinner cooking, I’d be drawn to the TV. The parade would be on. I’d plop down with my cousins watching the balloons and all the magic of the parade.

This year’s Thanksgiving wasn’t a lot different. Now, it’s me in the kitchen making my one obligatory dish, apple-sausage stuffing. The parade is usually on mostly for background noise and nostalgia, but this year something caught my eye.  I stopped to really watch. There were two brown-skinned women in the lineup for the Rockettes. They weren’t so light skinned that I barely noticed them as people of color. These were brown-skinned women who stood out in the mostly white precision line. I called my best friend, my Black best friend. She had noticed them too.

Founded in 1925, it’s not surprising that the Rockettes was an all-white dance troupe. Segregation was the law and the custom. What is a bit surprising, and disturbing, is the organization’s depth of commitment to being all-white and the length of time that it remained so. At one point, the founder, Russell Markert, forbade the dancers from even getting a tan because “they might look like a colored girl.” Violet Holmes, a former director and choreographer said when asked about integrating the troupe, “Blacks would distract from ‘the look of precision,’ the Rockettes’ trademark.”

The first woman of color, Jennifer Jones, wasn’t added to the troupe until 1987 for a special Super Bowl performance. 1987. This was after the pinnacle of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, after Beverly Johnson became the first Black model to be on the cover of a fashion magazine, Vogue, in 1974 and after a Black woman, Vanessa Williams, had been named Miss America in 1984, and, most importantly, after the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which prohibited employment discrimination. This dance group remained committed to being all-white for as long as possible.  So, even when the Rockettes finally integrated, it was not surprising that the lighter skinned candidates had a greater chance of acceptance, regardless of the dancing skills of browner girls, because the lighter ones would blend in with the look the organization was seeking and the Rockettes could check the “integrated” box.

So, in 2022, is it heartwarming or saddening that I found a moment of joy in seeing two brown-skinned girls proudly on the Rockettes’ line in front of Macy’s this Thanksgiving Day?

Pictured here — one of the two brown skinned girls in the Rockettes’ 2022 Thanksgiving Day performance.

There are so many components in defining American culture.  The Rockettes and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade are a part of Americana. When my cousins and I were watching the parade decades ago, we didn’t see many, if anyone, who looked like us.  Subliminally, that lack of Black people sent us messages about where we could/should be and what we could do.  Representation matters in every aspect of American life and not just to children, to adults, too. While two brown-skinned girls dancing on the Rockettes’ line is not a deeply meaningful testament to the lessening of racism in America, it is another building block in creating a more racially just country … and it made me smile.

 

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Lock ‘Em Up: The Only Response?

A few weeks ago, I read about a 16-year-old, tried as an adult, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison for two armed carjackings. I was mindlessly scrolling the neighborhood site, Nextdoor, when I saw the post. At first, I thought the incident had happened in Washington, DC where I live since there had been a rash of carjackings in my neighborhood, but as I read, I learned this crime had occurred in Louisiana. Louisiana? Why was it posted on my Capitol Hill, DC Nextdoor? Then I noticed the volume of comments and the viciousness of some:

  • “GOOD and good riddance. Bye bye!!!!!”
  • “Good!!! Hope they catch and prosecute more of these car jackers! Teens or not … people work hard for their cars and more examples need to be made.”

And when someone questioned whether folks were satisfied that the punishment fit the crime, an immediate response was, “Actually, I AM!!!!!” followed by several similar comments and encouragement for DC to be more like Louisiana.

Then, the real impact hit me. This whole situation hurt my soul: another Black child was being lost to the criminal (in)justice system, a system that I know includes a disproportionate number of Black boys and men.  I was disturbed that no one seemed to care why this child was doing this. Lock him away was the only response. No mention of help or rehabilitation. I am not minimizing the crime. He was armed. The carjacking could have resulted in dire consequences (it didn’t). I understand those facts. I also understand that a 16 year old is still a child, a person who, according to Stanford University, has almost 10 more  years for their brain to fully mature and make wise decisions. 

Doing work on racial justice over the last few years has heightened my awareness of how bias, lack of resources and opportunities, and a host of other factors put Black kids at risk and how racism and bias are significant, often under-recognized, factors in how “justice” is meted out in America. As I reflected on my reaction to the Nextdoor exchange, I thought back to the viciousness of America’s response, not that long ago, to drugs and drug-related crimes. Remember “three strikes, you’re out,” America’s response to repeat offenders regardless of the severity of the crime?  Now drug usage has evolved into a public health issue. Growing and selling marijuana has become an acceptable business. Was race a factor in this change?  Some suggest that increased drug usage among suburban and rural whites was what transformed drug usage from an urban problem that was criminal to a public health problem deserving understanding and treatment. Think about that for a while.

Years ago, a former colleague suggested that prisons should be banned. At the time – about 2017 – I couldn’t wrap my mind around what I perceived as an incredibly radical, and probably unrealistic, idea. Now, I am beginning to understand that thinking. When will the social and mental health issues that undergird so many of the behaviors that place people, particularly young people, in prisons be considered? When will society focus on treatment of those underlying problems as the humane and merited response and look at the caging of humans as radical and reactionary?  When will help, not punishment, become the first (or even second) intervention? Does race play a role in preventing this transformation?

For those who know their American history, the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution is correctly reported as the amendment that ended slavery. It is also the amendment that still allows for slavery when a crime is committed. The actual language is,

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Both Ava DuVernay in her documentary, “13th” and Michelle Alexander in her New York Times bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness prompt us to consider the connections between racial injustice and the business of America. Just as slavery offered a financial foundation for this country, today’s prison-industrial complex — bail bondsmen, court stenographers, bailiffs, lawyers, judges, prison guards, companies that supply food to prisons, prison security tech companies, and the list goes on – demands a steady increase in what is criminalized  and the number who are imprisoned in order to support the system.  And, while African Americans comprise about 14% of America’s citizenry, Blacks are about 40% of the imprisoned. Again, just think about that.

A 16-year-old was put in prison in Louisiana for 55 years and some people – too many — in a small neighborhood in Washington, DC cheered.