our deathly fear

fear.

today i want to speak to you about fear.
it is not a pleasant subject, and at this point in the pandemic, a subject that’s been discussed, referred to, and joked about enough to become cliche. yet that does not change the fact that fear is, in this moment, atmospheric, the thing we wish we could stop noticing, overlook, escape. it soaks into everything — no interaction, no hour, is untouched.

i’d argue it is the thing that most unifies the vastly different experiences of this moment — from the exhausted ER doctor to the isolated retiree to the stranded college student to the single mother to the undocumented father — we are all of us afraid.

this fear is unique, encompassing, existential, and it changes everything. it lands deep inside us, waking us up to the fragility of our tender, tenuous human frame.

for many of us, this is a brand new experience. for the first time, many of us are finding out what it means to hesitate at the threshold of our own front doors. our stomachs clench, our bodies surge with the acid heat of anxiety as we reach for the knob. each time we do, now, a part of us, our ancient, survival-driven, well-tuned antenna of fear, resists us. it tells us that outside our four walls lies a world full of danger, of risks impossible to fully anticipate or quantify. we know, with chilling certainty, that there is little we can do, ultimately, to protect ourselves.

instead, as we move through the world, our pores feel like exposed nerves, every touch of the outdoor air a hazard, every accidental skin-brush a possible calamity.

for all of us, for now, this is the price of emerging, of being, in the world.

it’s excruciating for many. some are able, at least for a time, to override the screeching alarm bells in our head, and we venture out, making furtive trips to grocery stores or stealing a stroll around the block — i call them my “sanity walks.” others of us find ourselves unable, or unwilling, to take the risk. in any case, it is a bleak, slow-bleeding kind of conundrum, this never-feeling-safe.

yet i would suggest to you that if this is the first time you’ve felt anything like this visceral vulnerability, you’ve led a very particular, very privileged life.

so many among us have known a version of this fear virtually every day of their existence.

truth is, for far too many of us, the simple decision to leave home — for a jog, to go to work, to grab a pack of Skittles, or even to answer the door — has always been a potentially lethal activity.

what is it like, i wonder — sitting here in my female, half-Arab, cis, white-presenting body — to have known from childhood that my physical features will mark me as a threat to others, while simultaneously rendering me the most threatened of all the human beings around me? for this is the experience that many black voices have described for generations — the exhausting, delicate work of surviving a society in which those with the most power believe themselves to be in endangered, and use this fear to justify terrorizing the imagined threat, embodied in blackness.

did it cross Ahmaud Arbery’s mind, on his final day on Earth, as he laced his running shoes and reached to open his own front door? did Walter Scott glance at his tail light before getting in his car, knowing the mechanical glitch could cost him his life? had Trayvon Martin, still just a teenager, learned yet to balance the hazard of being black in America with his human hungers, his desire to move freely? how many times a day do my black neighbors and friends have to make such cruel calculations? what does it feel like to know that even wearing a mask to protect oneself from COVID-19 could render one a target? how much courage does it take, to simply refuse to be strangled, pinned-down, within the racist grid that overlays American life?

these are rhetorical questions — black voices have always been present, telling us the truth about life in a land founded on white supremacy. the story of their fear, and their daily transcendence of that fear, is woven throughout our national legacy: tucked between the lines of African American spirituals and oral histories, in the eloquence of Fredrick Douglass, in the fire of Malcom X, in the searing beauty of Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, in the boldness of Ava Duvernay — to name a very, very, very few — and of course, hidden in plain sight in the endless stream of headlines, police reports, viral videos. (reading just a clip of the transcript of Kenneth Walker’s 911 call, as he stood over the body of his dead girlfriend, Breonna Taylor, chills me to the bone: “I don’t know what happened … somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend…I don’t know, she is on the ground right now. I don’t know, I don’t know…Help!…Oh my God.”)

the tragedy is how frequently and utterly we have failed — refused — to listen.

when COVID overtook our national consciousness, among the many things that frightened and concerned me was the question of what this mass distraction would do to our society’s most vulnerable. i feared not only that the disease would ravage communities along vastly disparate, color — and income — drawn lines, but also that ongoing abuses like police brutality, racial oppression, and our nation’s inhumanity towards immigrants and asylum seekers would lose all visibility. i feared those among us who carried on the day-to-day grind of activism and advocacy would understandably have to set aside their work as they grappled with the grim business of surviving.

i was afraid because, damn it, for all the countless ways life has ground to a halt since the virus arrived, white supremacy in this country has never taken a single day off, not since 1619.

some have managed to keep on raising issues of social justice, even through the chaos, and the emerging, if unsurprising, evidence that COVID-19 is killing more black, brown, and Native folks than white ones, caused some outrage, and some dutiful hand-wringing.

data seldom drives people to the streets, though. as usual, it took abject horror to punctuate our national distraction, to garner a few headlines amidst the death tolls, Trump tweets, and the endless economic conjecture. it took black blood on the asphalt, again. it took bodies, added to the still-uncountable casualties of white callousness, white hate, white fear. it took video evidence, utter, obscene, irrefutable. once again, it took black death to activate groups outside the core communities of activists and affected persons.

i’ve watched many of my white friends reckon with these last few weeks of collective horror — i’ve seen them jog, post, re-post, confess, share, learn, grow. i’ve done all of these things, too. these reactions are necessary, the slow, painful births of a new consciousness that may, i hope, add up to a different future one day.

but my black friends? they tell me they are tired. so tired. nearly six decades removed from Martin Luther King Jr., i hear his voice echo “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait’…But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” (if you’ve never read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in full, stop reading this and go do so, please).

theirs is a grief that is ancient, and forever unknowable to me. theirs is a righteous anger that could rage forever, justifiably, should they choose to live by that flame. even so, many continue to choose instead to contain this anger, to continue, in the midst of this country built by and for the oppression of non-white bodies, to live a life of humanity, dignity, prosperity, hope.

nothing will stop this — nothing ever has. but everyone gets tired — and i cannot imagine the weariness. because for all i read and watch and strive to learn, i cannot know what it feels like, to be so continually betrayed.

***

i remember my first march. i was in college when i heard the story of a young man named Trayvon Martin who was gunned down by a white, self-appointed vigilante as he trod home from 7–11, candy in hand.

so many men, women, and children had suffered deaths like these before him, yet somehow, i’d never quite woken up to this sort of violence before. but something about his particular story, the utter senselessness of his killing and the brazen self-righteousness of his killer, pierced me.

i cried for days. my best friend at the time, a black woman and historian-in-the-making, watched me weep, graciously held space as i shed painful layers of ignorance. her face was compassionate and sober, as if to say, “yes. i know. yes. i. know.” another friend, the proud son of Eritrean immigrants with one of the most buoyant and beautiful smiles i’ve ever known, took me with him to an ad-hoc rally organized by several African and black student groups. i hung back, ashamed, broken, still crying, and listened. the grace of the rage in that room slowly seeped into me until i was soaked, agonized, and irrevocably changed. i’d begun waking up.

that semester (though my own brown, immigrant father would have been horrified to know) i began skipping class in order to attend more meetings, to participate in marches. suddenly, sitting inside felt unforgivable, while the world ravaged so many on the streets below. i read everything i could find written by and about black America. though i struggled (still struggle) with feeling unworthy, i joined the marches, encouraged and escorted by my patient black friends, and, eventually, i lent my voice to theirs. i learned of the radical difference between giving lip service to a cause, and actually putting my body in the street, coming up close to law enforcement and finding myself, too, suddenly afraid of how they might view me, how they might treat me — no longer a model citizen.

and yet knowing my black, male companion faced a far more potent threat — that day, and every day (he’d later be assaulted by a cop, while on campus helping a classmate move — the cop saw him carrying a TV and assumed he was stealing).

i came to see that the safety and privilege afforded by my whiteness (as well as my status as a US citizen) was a resource i could use, under the guidance and of the black community, to leverage for change. i grew hoarse saying, i am horrified of what our country, our race, is capable of. i demand that we grieve and change. we wore hoodies and screamed, “we are Trayvon Martin. we are NOT SUSPICIOUS.”

as if shouting loud enough would change things.

i’d already spent years organizing for causes like environmental justice and Palestine; i was familiar with the history of the Civil Rights movement and other racial justice leaders. i was aware, to a degree, of our nation’s ability to excuse, justify, or simply ignore racial oppression and violence.

yet the anger and grief was such a living, moving thing in us, in that crowd, it felt possible that this time, something might change.

that was eight years ago.

and the killings have not stopped. the convictions of the guilty rarely come. the danger remains; so does the fear. marches continue, even in a pandemic, and the side-stepping of justice carries on. (even Trump’s tweets glorifying violence against protestors — a recklessness so repugnant it debases us all — is not new — American leaders have characterized protestors as criminals since this nation began). is it any wonder folks are angry, is it any wonder they are tired?

i mean, i’m tired, and by God, i’ve only just shown up to this fight. i come with the fortification afforded to me by a life of privilege, by the ease and respect i garner by living in white skin. i arrive with a spotted record of my own complicity — i attended a university that was built on stolen land, that took over a century to enroll its first black students (it excluded Jewish students and women, among others, for years too). i live in a historically-black neighborhood of Brooklyn, and am a part of the inflating rent market and the erosion of a black homeownership. i don’t know precisely how my presence, as a white, female body, has influenced the forms of policing in this neighborhood, but i know even my oblivion reflects my resounding privilege.

…i could go on, but i’ve spent far too long talking about myself already. i’m merely gesturing towards the inescapable fact that there is no middle ground here. as white (or white-presenting) folks, simply going about our lives, taking care of our own, concerning ourselves simply with our own safety and pleasure, is to collude with a racist system. none of us is untouched — we are victimized or participants of racist realities. or, in the words of Ibram X. Kendi (a must-read among our contemporary teachers), “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.”

in other words, the work never ends. wherever we are on this journey, we must not stop moving forward — forward into solidarity, understanding, action, and even sacrifice.

***

one last word about fear, and bodies.

another gruesome headline crossed our national consciousness this week: 100,000 dead from COVID-19. this nation, which comprises only 5% of the world population, now accounts for roughly one third of the global dead.

we are all touched, touchable, by senseless death, these days. for so many of us, it is a shocking experience — to know that bodies are piling up, and, even for us white folks, these bodies look like us, like our loved ones.

words like “unprecedented” are being used, appropriately. but i press us all, once again, to reflect that some among us might simply be experiencing deja vú — they’ve always known their bodies as tenuous, vulnerable places, and public spaces as a realm where death can too quickly appear. and as we see the way science-denial and political polarization has led to so much needless death, let us reflect on the ways that laws and policies come home to our bodies. the “war of ideas” is never just theoretical. ideas directly impact living bodies, and our living planet, even when our privilege allows us to ignore this fact.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote as much in a letter to his young son. I’ll leave you here:

“But all our phrasing — race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy — serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”