Two weeks ago I used my aunt’s car to make my way across New Orleans. I am back in Louisiana, where I was born and raised, for a few weeks, and she has lent me her car so that I’m able to run all the errands my mother inevitably assigns to me each time I return home. When I am done, I drive the car back to my aunt’s house, which is only a few blocks from my parents’. On that day, I pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition, got out of the car, and turned around to see a police car pulling up behind me.
My heart began racing. I had done nothing wrong. I had nothing to worry about. Right? But the sight of an officer approaching me as I stepped out of my car left me consumed with a particular sort of anxiety—the sort that stems from having watched and heard about innumerable examples of police encounters that begin peacefully but do not end as such. Do I stand still? Do I keep walking toward him? Do I pull out my phone just in case? Will he think I’m reaching for something else? Is his hand on his holster? Do I look nervous? I was.
The officer asked for my I.D. I gave it to him. I did not pull out my phone. I told him that this was where my aunt lives. That this was her car. That I was just borrowing it. That I didn’t know why the alarm was going off in the house. I do not know if he believed me. He looked at my I.D. Then back at me. Then back at the I.D. He went to his car to run my name. He found nothing. After I called my aunt, who was not far down the road, she returned to the house and explained to the police officer what had happened. The alarm was going off because when she left the house, a few minutes before, she had accidentally put in the wrong code, so the system alerted the police, who came to the house. She apologized profusely. I asked the officer to please hand back my I.D. He handed it back, then pulled off and away from the house. In this instance, the officer was doing what he was supposed to do. And so was I. And still, even after an encounter in which no violence ensued, the fear that something might transpire left my chest tight. What would have happened if my aunt hadn’t picked up the phone?
Most police encounters do not end in people getting killed. But far too many do. Every two days, a black person is shot by the police. It can be easy for some to say that espousing a sense of fear for a routine police encounter is hyperbolic and counterproductive. But one can only say such a thing when those who look like them have not been deemed disposable by the state. In the past several years, we have been witness to more and more black men and women dying on the other side of the camera lens, and earlier this month we saw two more.
Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live.
Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castile. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence.
The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.
According to a study by the American Psychology Association, “more than three in four black adults report experiencing day-to-day discrimination and nearly two in five black men say that police have unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused them.” Living under the perpetual and pervasive threat of racism seems, for black men and black women, to quite literally reduce lifespans. Black people face social and economic challenges—often deriving from institutionalized racism—in the form of disparities in education, housing, food, medical care, and many other things. But the act of interfacing with prejudice itself has profound psychological implications, resulting in the sorts of trauma that last long beyond the incidents themselves.
Perhaps just as important, according to research published this past December in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, simply perceiving or anticipating discrimination contributes to chronic stress that can cause an increase in blood-pressure problems, coronary-artery disease, cognitive impairment, and infant mortality. Black Americans do not have to directly experience police brutality to experience the negative health ramifications of its possibility. And that fear is not something grounded in paranoia. As President Obama noted in his speech after the deaths of Sterling and Castile, these disparities in treatment at the hands of the police are well-documented.
Many of us know the statistics that Obama and others cite. And many of us know them both anecdotally and empirically. They are written into our psyche every time we see a police car, walk into a store, or apply for a job. Preparing oneself for the possibility of confronting racism triggers something that slowly chips away at physical and emotional well-being.
As a result, many people chose not to watch or share the videos of either Sterling or Castile’s death, as the activist April Reign wrote in the Washington Post. As Reign told me of these videos, “the repeated watching can cause emotional and mental trauma. Many activists in this movement are experiencing P.T.S.D.” The psychological toll of fearing discrimination, fearing retribution, or fearing the simple act of stepping out of one’s house is immense and ongoing. For many, refusing to watch viral videos of black death is not an act of apathy. Turning off the news is not an act of indifference. Sometimes, these are acts of self-preservation.
In a text message that my aunt sent me after the confrontation with the policeman in front of her home, she said, “I couldn’t get back home quick enough when you called and said the alarm went off and the police were questioning you. I was very nervous.” I could envision her receiving my call, eyes illuminated with panic as she rushed home, holding her breath.
When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else. And when we experience everything that this country confronts us with, our bodies remind us of that.
