The tragic death of George Floyd and the protests that followed have made me realize how little I know about what it means to be Black in today’s America.  I’ve had a comfortable white upbringing and although I’ve had contact with many African-Americans at school and work, I haven’t known any well enough to get anything more than a quick glimpse of their regular encounters with racism.  I got one such glimpse when I had a job in the Philadelphia suburbs and lived on the outskirts of town.  One day a young Black computer programmer I worked with asked me if he could grab a ride to work for a few days while his car was in the shop.  I said sure and then proceeded to get a short tutorial about what’s it like to be a young African-American man that drives a BMW and lives in a predominately white area.  I couldn’t believe how many times he had been pulled over for driving while Black.  Many people I’ve since told his story to were not surprised at all.

And then I heard Cory Booker speak the other day about his disturbing encounters with police over the course of his life.  The 51 year-old US senator, Rhodes scholar, and Yale Law graduate thought twice just last week about walking home from the Capitol in shorts and a t-shirt for fear he might be harassed by police who’d see him as a threat.  If Cory Booker is worried about having a confrontation with police, then I can only imagine the amount of fear African-Americans in less exalted positions must feel day in and day out.  And I have to believe traumatic events such as one that happened when Senator Booker was an undergrad at Stanford – being followed by mall security and then getting pulled over and confronted by six police because he “fit the description” of a car thief – have contributed to the anxiety he still has decades later about walking while black.

Killing fast, killing slow

We often talk about how racism kills African-Americans.  Sometimes it snuffs out a Black life fast, as when a racist cop digs his knee into a black man’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds.  Other times death comes more slowly as poverty and its attendant lack of access to healthy food, good medical care, and a host of other stressors wear down African-American bodies before their time.  And then finally, there are the more subtle traumas endured by economically comfortable African-Americans like Cory Booker that eventually claim their victims too.

If health outcomes were just a socioeconomic issue, then middle class Blacks would not suffer from worse health than their white socioeconomic peers.  According to Cynthia Colen, an associate professor at Ohio State who co-authored a 2018 study on the topic, Black women with a graduate education have higher rates of infant and maternal mortality than white women with only a high school education.  Professor Colen has two theories for what’s behind the health disparities between Black and white middle class people.  First, she says that Blacks are exposed to increasing amounts of racism as they move into settings with greater numbers of white people.  And a second factor she suspects is the constant stress faced by middle-class African-Americans who are expected to speak for the entire Black community because they are the only Black person that many of the white people in their lives know.  I’m sure it wasn’t easy for my Black co-worker to tell me about his humiliating encounters with the police.

And lest you doubt Professor Colen’s main thesis, there is biological evidence that the toxic stress of racism results in increased inflammation in many African-Americans’ bodies and accelerated shortening of their chromosomes’ telomeres, which is associated with premature aging.

Specific coping strategies, like the ones described on the website of the University of Illinois counseling center, have been developed to help African-Americans and members of other stigmatized groups deal with the unrelenting, unique stress they face. While these strategies are effective in minimizing the psychic and physical damage of racial prejudice, the ultimate goal must be a cure for this insidious disease.