‘This is when I see the body’
Police brutality is causing a mental health crisis among Black Americans.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
By Glyniss Wiggins*
*Glyniss was my student at NYU this past semester. This story came out of the final feature assignment she wrote. I’m honored to publish her excellent work.
It was the evening of Sept. 21, 2016, and outraged protesters were marching the streets of Uptown Charlotte, in North Carolina, blocking major intersections and stopping traffic. Jasmine Wright, a community organizer and activist who was 24 at the time, was one of many people protesting the death of Keith Lamont Scott, who had been killed by a Charlotte police officer the previous day.
As Wright walked in stride with protesters and the afternoon turned to early evening, officers warned that they had to leave soon. The protesters refused to stand down though, and Wright watched as the peaceful protest quickly turned into chaos. The officers began throwing canisters of tear gas and firing rubber bullets into the crowd. Wright, dodging the havoc, turned a corner near a busy intersection, seeking medical assistance for protesters who had been injured. Instead, she witnessed something shocking.
“As I’m looking through the smoke, dodging stuff,” she said, “this is when I see the body. I saw Justin drop in front of me.”
The young Black man was Justin Carr, 26. It’s under dispute as to what exactly killed him, but a number of news outlets report that he was killed by a gunshot wound to the head. Wright said that at this point, police were pushing people away from the scene, and since many people were already injured, “nobody knew another young man had died.” Wright said she didn’t find out Carr was dead until the next day.
After Carr’s death and the intensity of the protests — and the ongoing, hot racial climate across the country — Wright fell into a state of depression.
She is just one of many Black Americans who has been deeply affected by a heightened awareness of police violence and/or witnessing police brutality. Many family members of those killed by police violence, and Black Americans who witness it, often experience signs of mental health issues. William A. Smith, an expert in critical race theory and a professor of ethics at the University of Utah, created the term “racial battle fatigue” sometime around 2008. The term describes how continued acts of discrimination and racism can cause Black people to “suffer various forms of mental, emotional, and physical strain, which can lead to psychophysiological symptoms.”
What Wright saw made her susceptible to such fatigue. But even as she sunk into depression, nationwide protests for Black rights were still going strong. Could she keep herself as involved as she had been?
“Anytime somebody said we’re going out protesting in Charlotte, I was quick to be like, I’m good, I’ll hold off,” said Wright, “I wasn’t ready to go back down there yet.”
Since witnessing Carr’s death, Wright has been immobilized.
***
Wright explained that it took time to become fully aware of how badly all the events she’d lived through had affected her. For about two years, she said, she did not go back into electoral organizing or activism work. She dropped out of grad school and began working more manual-labor jobs. It wasn’t until 2018, after getting another position in the organizing field, that she sought help for her mental health.
Anxiety disorder is one of the most common mental health conditions in the U.S. today, according to a 2020 report in Medical News Today. But Black Americans face additional risk factors for anxiety such as “exposure to racism and racist abuse” and higher trauma rates because of police violence. A 2010 study published in the journal Psychological Medicine showed that the lifetime prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder was highest among Blacks, at 8.7 percent.
Wright told me that after she witnessed what happened that day, she’d needed time to sit with herself and fully understand her apprehension about getting back into the work she was once so passionate about. She said that she hadn’t recognized the pain she was feeling after that day, despite the persistent evidence of the kind of violence she’d witnessed being shared across social media. She finally did see it for what it was, she said, once she got back into the organizing world in 2018.
Videos of police violence and brutality against Black people are often spread via social media — with no trigger warnings. Usually, these videos help spread awareness of racism and discrimination and bring communities together to protest these injustices. But while these viral videos help to bring about important conversations about police reform and accountability, many Black people have expressed that viewing videos of violence or brutality against other Black people have left them feeling hopeless or mentally drained.
Most of us have, by now, seen the nine-minute video of officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as he pleads for his life. The video spread rapidly in May 2020 across all social media platforms and was broadcast repeatedly on TV news. For two months after that video went viral, a study done by Pex, a database that collects media from different sites, reported that race, protests, and Black Lives Matter videos had been watched approximately 1.4 billion times via Twitter alone.
Aysia Evans, a community director at Georgetown University in Washington, said that constantly seeing these videos being shared by friends on social media made it “very hard” for her to function, despite how newsworthy they were.
She explained how while there have been advancements in social media in terms of sensitivity — meaning that companies may blur out photos that you have to click to uncover — social media is still a dangerous place for her psyche.
“You would be scrolling and then suddenly see someone being shot in the chest,” Evans said. “So, you’re accidentally stumbling across those videos and not realizing what you’re watching until you’re watching it.”
She was clear: “I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see this in real life. I don’t want to see this on the internet.”
***
Darnella Fraizer was 17 when she witnessed and recorded the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. She captured the final chilling moments of his life. Though her video brought awareness to this act of police violence, Frazier has publicly expressed her own bouts with mental health struggles after the event.
In a Facebook post on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death in 2021, she said: “A lot of people call me a hero even though I don’t see myself as one. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
Frazier also expressed that she’s had post-traumatic stress and anxiety, as well as panic attacks, whenever she sees a police car. “It changed me,” she wrote. “It changed how I viewed life. It made me realize how dangerous it is to be Black in America.”
“Everyone,” she said, “talks about the girl who recorded George Floyd’s death, but to actually be her is a different story.”
The Washington Post reported in 2020 that Black Americans showed “significant signs of anxiety or depressive disorders” following Floyd’s death, with the amount jumping from 36 percent to 41 percent after the video was released. That’s an increase of about 1.4 million Americans.
While white people are also affected by the horror of these videos, being Black is a different story. Evans explained that her non-Black colleagues were also triggered, like her, by many of these police brutality videos, but having such conversations were “emotionally straining” for her. It was as though everyone had suddenly understood how “ridiculous” this implicit bias against Black people was.
On one hand, Evans said, it was “better late than never” for her colleagues to understand these injustices, but, on the other, she expressed frustration because this racism and brutality against Black people has been going on for centuries.
Black activists across the country have been fighting for change and police reform in America since slavery and through the Selma protests and beyond. With the newly heightened racial climate in the country, many Black activists have said that they feel they have to continue to spread awareness, despite the toll it may have on their mental health.
Shaun McMillan, an activist and co-founder of the Police Accountability Community Taskforce in Fayetteville, N.C., said that he’s learned when he needs to pull back to take care of himself.
“I remember in 2020 we were protesting a whole lot,” McMillan said of his taskforce, “and were really pushing very hard for changes to be made in Fayetteville. We’re looking at what’s going on nationally, what’s going on in the community. We really felt like we needed to push ourselves in order to affect change here.”
But McMillan said that he and the members of the taskforce had to learn how to distance themselves from the work they were doing in the community, and make sure that they all look out for one other. He also said that he’s stopped doing this kind of work for weeks at a time.
“Not everybody’s going to be able to go out and protest every day,” McMillan said. “Not everybody will have the bandwidth to get out there month after month to do this. You have to be patient with people and understand that everybody is doing what they can.”
Still, Paul Gorski, an researcher and activist, told NPR in 2020 that many Black activists feel “like a sellout” when taking a break from activism work, despite the fact that staying consistently in the fight can cause burnout — which Gorski said is yet another symptom of racial battle fatigue.
For many Black people, even just the awareness of bias within the police is enough to cause unease and mental distress, which is another symptom of racial battle fatigue.
McMillan said he believes that every Black person can recall at least one negative interaction they’ve had with law enforcement, even if they were not doing anything wrong. He says he’s had negative experiences with police since he was about 16.
“We understand, historically, there is not much we can do to address misconduct from any officer at any time,” McMillan said. “It means that the stakes are pretty high with every interaction with law enforcement.”
***
Despite the surge in protests over the last few years revolving around police violence, police brutality against Black Americans still remains much higher than against any other group. Black people only account for approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans, The Washington Post reported through its own collection of data between 2020 and 2021. Among Black people, there were approximately 38 shootings per million, while among whites, it was 15 per million as of May, according to Statista.
And it’s not like all of this is going unnoticed by the government — not anymore. Not since recent mass protests have forced the eyes of politicians open. Police reform bills are being presented in many areas across the country. However, with the high stats of police violence against Black people, a fully reformed police system seems very far out of reach.
McMillan said that he is frustrated with “how little lawmakers are willing to do” when it comes to a massive course correction in the police force. “We have the majority of Americans that agree that reform needs to happen,” he said. “We continue to be inundated with examples of the system failing. I don’t understand why they’re not willing to act aggressively to reconfigure the entire justice system.”
Given the history of America, Evans believes that it is difficult to reform the justice system when it wasn’t built to protect Black people to begin with.
The fight for racial equality in America seems never-ending, but activists, victims, and families affected by police violence, as well as many other Black Americans, continue the fight, despite fatigue.
Wright said she doesn’t protest as much as she once had, but supporting local youth in her community has motivated her.
“When I think about how to continue this work or how to move things forward, it’s the youth who are going to keep this work going,” she said. “So if going to a march or a protest is what inspires a young person, I know as an organizer, I’ll support that.”
Because of her experience in 2016, Wright is fully alert, mentally executing exit plans, and looking for signs that a protest may begin to escalate.
She is still in the process of finding a therapist that is a good fit for her to talk about what she went through, but, like many Black people fighting against injustices, she is more aware now of when to take a step back. Racial battle fatigue — as with any kind of fatigue — means that you have to take care of yourself before you continue, lest you collapse.
Glyniss Wiggins is a writer and editor covering social justice and race, as well as art, media and pop culture.
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The timing of this piece is stunning considering the recent racially motivated murder of 10 Black people in Buffalo, NY. Glyniss has related the life experience of, it seems many if not most, Black Americans. I personally have been told by a Black woman that I have known for many years about “the talk”! Basically Black parents telling their children how they must behave under certain situations. It is virtually impossible for a white person to fully understand the world that they are forced to live in.
This is beautifully written and stunningly sad. The idea of living in a society with police, who are supposed to protect you, but might turn on you for no reason is traumatic. Every day. Of your entire life.
She learned very well from the master.