It’s been a hell of a weekend. I wish everyone safety — and if it’s too late for that, a fast recovery. I’m still trying to process the events, in Boston and Minneapolis and DC and New York and Louisville …
Let’s take a moment to consider our African-American neighbors, friends, family, colleagues, who are enduring searing pain today, the pain of terror and grief. Vicarious trauma is a thing — especially when “there but for the grace of God go I” is all too easy to imagine.
Escaping the imagery can be nearly impossible, especially as online users post commentary and news updates. For some, it can merely be a nuisance. But research suggests that for people of color, frequent exposure to the shootings of black people can have long-term mental health effects. According to Monnica Williams, clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Louisville, graphic videos (which she calls vicarious trauma) combined with lived experiences of racism, can create severe psychological problems reminiscent of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“There’s a heightened sense of fear and anxiety when you feel like you can’t trust the people who’ve been put in charge to keep you safe. Instead, you see them killing people who look like you,” she says. “Combined with the everyday instances of racism, like microaggressions and discrimination, that contributes to a sense of alienation and isolation. It’s race-based trauma.”
I wasn’t prepared for the banal, casual open-air murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Or that of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia; or Breonna Taylor in Louisville; nor even the downright viciousness of the Central Park dog lady video. To be surprised would be unacceptably naïve; but shock is a different thing, a reminder that one still possesses a beating heart. I don’t ever want to be be prepared, desensitized, incapable of horror. To retain some decency means being capable of having your heart broken, repeatedly.
But it’s possible for a white person to forget, to tune out.
James Baldwin wrote recurrently about “white innocence”: The lack of a sense of tragedy in life — that we could be egregiously wrong, that the worst could happen, is happening, and has happened — which makes us arrogant, entitled, and even monstrous.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James Baldwin, quoted in the New Yorker “Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” By Teju Cole, August 19, 2014
White people need to stand out, not just to show solidarity with black folks, but to other white people. Getting right with this will not occur with moralizing, but with deep psychological assay, and community accountability. Even white liberals – who presumably know better and want to do better – mentally guard white-liberal spaces with a deeply buried, reflexive vigilance. Those spaces, mental and physical, are innocent: Well-meaning, unintentional, unspoken-until-they-aren’t.
The sliver of racism that lives in so many of us – as if it were the air we inhale and exhale – manifests itself in micro-aggressions on the personal level, and becomes deadly when it is wielded by those of us with power — including the power of 911.
- For a cop, racism is a mortal danger. It takes away a person’s life, liberty, and property.
- For a doctor, it deprives a person of life and health, the quality and experience of precious minutes on the earth.
- For a teacher, it deprives a student of knowledge, attention, and life potential.
- For an employer, it deprives an employee of support, collegiality, respect, income, and maybe the job itself.
- For a cultural institution or recreational space, it deprives a patron of a physical and mental space for beauty and contemplation – to take with them wherever they go. This has health effects too.
- For a neighbor, it deprives a neighbor of dignity and complexity; of welcome and a sense of home.
What seems innocent, even banal, turns deadly under the slightest pressure. Big Racism and Little Racism exist on a continuum; they are different in degree but not kind. What an immense waste of human potential, and of precious time on earth.
May we create any small garden of peace and healing where we can.
I’ll just add that the teacher who reported the MFA incident is a friend of mine from our fellowship cohort at BU. She’s a phenomenal educator and it’s a shame Boston lost her to Houston, partly because of all the flack she got for speaking her truth. Not just from her administrators, but from total strangers who attacked her.
So a reminder that speaking out, even if the good guys win, results in consequences for black people that white people do not have to deal with. So much racism goes unreported since it’s easier for people to keep their head down. There are probably hundreds of George Floyd’s we do not know about who’s deaths were never caught on camera and who’s loved ones are afraid to speak out.
Every black person I went to U Chicago with had issues with campus police and the CPD. The oasis of Cambridge I grew up in is getting more racist as it backslides into affluence and whiteness due to gentrification. We saw that with the Karen who reported her black neighbors. We see that with Prof Gates. We see that with my friends who got thrown against walls by cops for wearing hoodies in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has to stop. It has to end. I don’t want my students or my nephew on the receiving end of racism.
Marvelyne Lamy? In earlier drafts of this post I said more about her … couldn’t hold the piece together tho. I heard the intervew with her on … ‘BUR? where she was asked if she would ever go back to the MFA after their reform measures, and she immediately says no, you can’t return to the place you were traumatized. As someone who loves the MFA that’s just so heartbreaking to me, that it would be psychologically off-limits to someone.
Boston’s loss, in so many ways.
Yep! She taught at the other campus, but we had multiple BU classes and a weekly fellowship seminar together. We also observed each other teach multiple times, so I’m not surprised to see her stand up for her students. Covid may have put her move on hold because she is still here, but it’s really sad. Especially since she largely grew up here.
I know multiple people of color from my undergrad who turned down opportunities to study in Boston, even at Harvard, because our reputation with people of color is that bad. None of them grew up here though.
When I taught in Roxbury at the same network she did, I took a group of students to the main branch of the BPL and they were shocked this beautiful building existed and was accessible to them. They had assumed it was a private museum or college building walking by. They also immediately lamented that their own branch in their neighborhood was a pale shadow of this one.
Ach. FWIW I think the renovated Dudley branch of BPL was supposed to re-open this spring. :\
Yep that would be the branch. Would the branch also be Nubian now?