The Deadly Power of Racially Induced Stress

Asking Black people to remain calm and poised in the face of insulting, humiliating and provocative verbal attacks, the way Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson did when facing abusive questioning from Senators Hawley, Cruz, and so many others, is to ask them to take years off their lives! Race related stress is as much a killer as cancer or heart disease. It places a burden on our Black friends, colleagues and family members that we can do little to ease. Those who call for color blind policy and color blind law as if they were moral absolutes are completely insensitive to the realities of Black life in the United States. What just took place in the Senate exposes the cruelty of those who use Dr. King's language to promote a post racial vision of American life that ignores vast racial disparities in income, wealth, property ownership, life expectancy and lived experience. It also ignores the power of racial stereotypes that inhibit Black professionals from responding normally to acts of aggression lest they be stigmatized as an "angry Black person" and prevented from doing their jobs.