Tracey L. Rogers: Being Black is very bad for your health in America

Martin Luther King Jr., ravaged by white racism

Via OtherWords.org

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, his autopsy report revealed that at the young age of 39, he had “the heart of a 60-year-old.”

Doctors concluded that King’s heart had aged due to the stress and pressure endured throughout his 13-year civil-rights career.

A 13-year tribulation sounds more fitting. Along with the victories he won through his long career preaching while organizing marches, boycotts and sit-ins, King also suffered from severe bouts of depression, received multiple threats on his life and the safety of his family, and was repeatedly arrested.

In fact, near the end of his life, as reported in Time magazine, Dr. King “confronted the uncertainty of his moral vision. He had underestimated how deeply the belief that white people matter more than others was ingrained in the habits of American life.”

There’s a reason why novelist and activist James Baldwin said in 1961, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time,” a rage that weathers our bodies and psyches.

“It isn’t only what’s happening to you,” Baldwin explained. “It’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country and their ignorance.”

As a Black woman and activist, I can say that my rage weathers me, too.

It can feel as subtle as the frustration I feel after receiving an e-mail from a white man accusing me of being a Marxist simply because I supported the Black Lives Matter movement (true story).

Or it can be as anguishing as the pain I feel simply thinking about Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times at point-blank range by police in Kenosha, Wis.. Or the anger I feel about the president of the United States openly fomenting violence in the shooting’s aftermath, praising the 17-year-old white militia member who killed two protesters.

If Dr. King had the heart of a 60-year-old when he died, it’s easy to see how his fight for racial justice might have weathered him. But one might argue that its weathering began the moment he was born in the era of Jim Crow, just 64-years after the formal emancipation of enslaved people.

The all-around weathering of Black America is as big a part of our legacy as slavery, voting rights, and our commitment to freedom. It’s a weathering we experience every day, agitated by what’s been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) passed on from generation to generation.

A few years ago, an article published in Teen Vogue explained how it was possible for Black people to inherit PTSD from our ancestors. It highlighted the “extensive research into epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of trauma” by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, who found that “when people experience trauma, it changes their genes in a very specific and noticeable way.”

Sociologist Dr. Joy DeGruy coined the phrase “post-traumatic slave disorder” to describe the specific stress suffered by Black descendants of enslaved people, identifying the ways in which racialized trauma has had an emotional, physical, and psychological impact.

More recently, the Huffington Post reported that racial trauma increases the stress hormone cortisol in Black Americans, causing fatigue, depression and anxiety. Cities throughout the country have even issued declarations that racism is a public-health issue.

They’re right.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, many chronic illnesses are far more prevalent within the Black community. And there’s a growing consensus that these illnesses are a byproduct of everyday racism. “For Black people in particular,” said psychologist Dr. Lilian Comas-Diaz, “racial stress is something that happens throughout their life course.”

Whether it’s death by “weathering,” COVID-19, or inhumane policing, evidence shows that Black lives still don’t matter. And that’s why so many of us have taken to the streets — our hearts can’t take it anymore.

Tracey L. Rogers is an entrepreneur and activist in Philadelphia.

Don Pesci: Deep historical ignorance fuels push to moth-ball Columbus statues

Statue of Christopher Columbus in Seaside Park, in Bridgeport, Conn.

VERNON, Conn.

Christopher Columbus statues across Connecticut are being mothballed, but politicians in the state’s larger cities desperately want Italians to understand, in the words of Don Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, “It’s nothing personal.”

The pols in Connecticut, a state that has in it more Italians per square inch than most others, still need Italian votes. Will Italians, during the next elections, turn on anti-Columbus (and moth-balling supporters) such as Mayor Justin Elicker, of New Haven, and Mayor Luke Bronin, of Hartford? Italians, everyone knows from reading Puzo, like their revenge cooled in the fridge.

Both mayors have given Columbus statues the boot. Bronin said, “When the statue of Columbus was erected in Hartford a hundred years ago, it was meant to symbolize the fact that Italian-Americans, who had faced intense discrimination, had a place in the American story. But surely we can find a better way to honor the immense contributions of the Italian-American community in our country and in our community. I’ll also be working with our Italian-American community in Hartford and throughout the region to find an appropriate way to honor their incredibly important place in Hartford’s and our nation’s history.”

And Elicker concurred: “The Christopher Columbus statue for many Italians is a celebration of Italian heritage. But the statue of Christopher Columbus also represents a time of colonialism and atrocities committed. It is the right decision to remove the statue. After the statue is removed, I believe it is important that we, as a community, have a conversation about how to best honor the heritage of so many Italians who have made New Haven their home.”

Whomever these mayors have in mind for suitable stand-ins for Columbus – no names have been mentioned – none of the stand-ins will have been credited with opening the new continent to European exploration, the real irritant in the craws of Columbus haters.    

The assault on Columbus by "Black Lives  Matter" is particularly annoying because it is so wrong-headed. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, as we were taught to recite in schools long before it became fashionable to celebrate tribal differences in the United States under the rubric of diversity. We are quickly becoming “many out of one,” reversing the E Pluribus Unum motto on our increasingly worthless coinage.The first slaves were brought to what later became the United States – now the clannish dis-United States – in 1619, long after the death of Columbus. Certainly Columbus is less responsible for slavery and the oppression of African-Americans than, say, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the original Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was a fictional character created by “Daddy” Rice, around 1830, a little more than three decades before the father of the Republican Party, President Abraham Lincoln, issued his Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the midst of a bloody, corpse filled Civil War waged, among other reasons, to end slavery.

Rice was a “black face,” white minstrel artist who introduced Jim Crow, a fictional stereotypical slave, into his act. As his show became more and more popular, the expression “Jim Crow” became a widely used designation for blacks, and later, around the time Republican President  Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to facilitate the desegregation of public schools, the expression became a battle cry against racial discrimination in the south – not that the north was Simon-pure with respect to a poisonous tribalization of races that militated against E Pluribus Unum.

Hey, they don’t teach this sort of stuff anymore in Yale or Harvard; or, for that matter, in Hartford and New Haven high schools.

The whole business of discrimination still resonates with many Italians. The largest lynching in the United States occurred in 1891 -- 385 years after Columbus, certainly among the greatest navigators of his age and the man responsible for opening the Americas to a European discovery, died in obscurity, bleeding from his eyes at his home in Spain – when a New Orleans mob murdered 11 Italian-Americans following a trial of the Catholic “dagoes,” accused of murdering a police chief, that had produced six not-guilty verdicts and three mistrials. New Orleans was impatient for the justice of the rope, and so the innocent men were strung up.

Ah, well, stuff happens. Scripture tells us none of us are perfect, and history, we know, is pockmarked with imperfections. Democratic President Obama used to tell us that the details of history were less important than the arc of history. Modern historians and students -- engaged, like air-brusher Joseph Stalin, in the art of revising history through the murder of his political opponents – seem to think that the arc of history is less important than their own fictional version of the way things ought to have been during the days of Columbus.

The above named mayors of major cities in Connecticut have all claimed they are performing a public service by ridding public squares of Columbus statues to prevent vandalism, which is on a par with closing banks to prevent bank robberies or closing police stations to prevent arsonists from burning them down or tolerating the vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial by historical amnesiacs who have not, before despoiling the memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address engraved on the north wall of the memorial. In merry old England a statue of Churchill – who, along with President Franklin Roosevelt, wiped the noses of real Fascists in the dust – has been vandalized, likely by European anti-fascist-fascists, brothers and sisters in arms with domestic terrorists such as ANTIFA here in the USA.

Are there no video cameras that might be deployed around Columbus statues to apprehend and arrest the vandals? Are we truly incapable of making proper distinctions between peaceful, lawful protesters and the thugs who shield themselves behind licit protests to liberate Louis Vuitton stores of bags that may be sold on the black market to finance, among other things, the toppling of Columbus statues in Connecticut?

An Italian from New Haven writes me, that he wishes someone would say something “to let the public know that not everyone is complicit” in what he and most Italians regard as the usual, time honored anti-Italian, anti-Catholic historical revisionism.

Done.

My correspondent tells me he plans to vote in the upcoming November elections – after cool, revengeful deliberation -- to strike a blow for historical lucidity, liberty under law and those few politicians in Connecticut who find distasteful the destruction of public monuments in the state’s urban cultural war-zones.   

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.