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. 

I am my brother’s keeper, Part 2

Story Interrupted by Tragedy

I was about to push “send” on part 2 of a blog planned to honor my Native American grandmother, on today, her birthday. While a tribute to her, the message was twofold: Native peoples have been marginalized almost to the point of annihilation and we must all speak up when we see injustice. That message is important and will still be posted. But, how could I post that message without first acknowledging the most recent horrors against black people.

George Floyd and Christian Cooper.

There has been a flood of outrage at the murder of George Floyd and the malicious behavior directed against Christian Cooper. Through immediate actions and words, many are living out the expression, “my brother’s keeper.” That is good.  But once again, racism — power and privilege — was at the core.  Regardless of the fact that George Floyd was on the ground, handcuffed, saying he couldn’t breathe, and that the officer knew the incident was being recorded, that yet-to-be-named Minneapolis police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for at least five minutes until he was dead. Regardless of the fact that Christian Cooper was only asking Amy Cooper (no relation) to leash her dog so he could bird watch, with forethought and calculation, she called the police, positioning herself as the proverbial (white) damsel-in-distress threatened by a black man. Both the white police officer and the white dog walker instinctively understood and acted on their power, their societal position, their white privilege.

We are our brothers’ keepers. We must take responsibility and transform our world into candle and curtainwhat it should be. The officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck and those who stood by and watched have been fired. Will they now be charged with murder? The dog walker has been fired from her job. Now what?  Justice for George Floyd and Christian Cooper will be just that, justice for Floyd and Cooper, vitally important, but still only justice in two isolated, specific incidents.

Racial justice will occur when we look at, and change, the systems that create the police officers who seem not to fear killing an unarmed man or the bias that shone proudly as Amy Cooper told Christian Cooper what she would say on her call to the police. Racism and bias are fundamental in America. They are the foundation that gives structure to America — our (in)justice system, education system, health care system, the list goes on.  And the bias is so embedded in all that we see and do – our culture – that we have to work at catching ourselves and others as those often far-too-subtle words and actions are revealed.

Systemic/structural racism and implicit bias are real. George Floyd’s murderer and Amy Cooper are just the most recent ones to pull back the curtain.