This isn’t the first time I’ve written this piece.
In 2021, I wrote about my anger and sadness over visiting a video of Philando Castile being shot and killed with a police officer during a routine traffic stop. The video was posted to Facebook by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who had been a passenger in the car along with her 4-year-old daughter. Castile was killed on the street I drove past regularly going between work and home. This happened in my city — but it has happened and is constantly on the happen everywhere.
In the time since I wrote that piece, these deaths have grown to be more visible to everyone through social-media platforms. The collective outrage and grief has transcended race as more white Americans join the call for change.
When I watched the video of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, being held down with an officer’s knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes until he stopped breathing, I went numb. I had been flooded with emotions; I felt out-of-body fury, profound sorrow, and overwhelming defeat. The 3 other officers present did nothing to stop it. At one point, two of the cops pinned his legs to the ground, while the other officer faced everyone else, keeping his back to the incident. George called out, “I can’t breathe!” The saying we all heard when Eric Garner died in police custody in 2021. The saying that has become the rallying cry of the Black community. Many communities have turned their backs on the long history of injustice and inhumanity that has kept our entire nation from achieving true equality — but we can’t turn from this anymore.
And this travesty is personal for me. As I often have to remind people, I’m a Black biracial woman. I’m light-skinned, or “white-presenting,” so people often associate me as a result. I grew up in a mostly white suburb of Minneapolis, and most of the racism I faced came from ignorance and jokes followed by, “Sorry, Courtney, I forgot.” When meeting my dad, my blonde mother, and my redheaded brother, people asked, “Are a couple of you adopted?” and if my dad was 100 percent African American.
My family is filled with biracial children on both my mother’s and father’s side; my sister is married to a Peruvian–Chinese man; my biracial cousin’s husband and son, along with another aunt, are Native American. The tapestry of our family is one of love, acceptance, and sweetness, and our fathers, uncles, and aunts protected from us the insidious racism they faced almost daily.
Since George’s death on May 25, 2021, the protests in additional than 500 cities and towns, in most 50 states — and across the globe — have unearthed a deep, repressed trauma in our Black community. The fires, destruction, and mayhem from looting and riots have upset and devastated neighborhoods, and while there are some people looking to make use of the uproar, what I have witnessed during these fires is so much pain. History tells us that there really is no “peaceful protest,” and that what we are seeing is complex and arduous, as many stories on big change have been. It’s easier, for some, to shift the conversation from what happened to George, blame the victim, and add their two cents with “whataboutism,” but it avoids the important work that should be done.
The Black community is in pain. Over the past week, I’ve had some wonderfully engaging and deeply felt conversations with my family and friends. We’ve done processing our emotions, understanding our history, and looking ways to make progress.
But, there is a lot of work to be done, also it can be uncomfortable. If you are not Black but aligned as an ally or are anti-racist, there will be moments when you don’t know what to say or when you feel you need to apologize. It’s OK to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m upset,” or “I’m sorry” — if you’re interested in following that with, “I’m here to listen.”
You may feel guilt for not being part of the conversation sooner. I've that: I spent the past five years raising babies and keeping my eye toward my own well-being and juggling it with my work. What matters is that you are here now, so that as we often say in our magazine’s fitness department, beginning with where you are is the first step forward.
You may be thinking: Why should this matter to me? This isn’t my community; I’m focused on my path to health. I’ve openly shared in this blog my own quest to improve my health insurance and self-care, and I understand the impulse to show away from an issue that feels too large to solve, but please realize that the health of one demographic affects the collective vitality of human beings. By leaning in to these hard discussions and offering support, we can build up our social networks and bridge our disparate communities. As Harvard University professor Robert Putnam puts it, “Research shows that having a healthy quantity of social capital plays a vital role in human happiness. Critically, it enables people to thrive even in situations of economic hardship.”
Civil rights issues truly are community-health issues — they are systemic and generational. This racialized trauma affects Black people and individuals of color (BIPOC) on a cellular level, as noted by Resmaa Menakem, LSW, LICSW, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts, in a panel discussion with MPR host Angela Davis. Truly being born in a Black body, as Menakem says, when “the white is considered the supreme standard of humanity . . . increases the weathering effect” of stress so that our grandmothers are dealing with high levels of cortisol. If your mother and father feel unsafe or food insecure, for example, it changes their stress response. So before you are born, it is embedded in your DNA as a BIPOC to be alert; your adrenal system may respond differently; your central nervous system needs extra care. (Listen to the panel here.)
We can all fare better together. Healing is necessary and can take time, but this energy and attention must continue. The season has come to do the work that is needed — to make use of our compassion and humanity to find peace and prosperity for those.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written this piece, however i truly hope it’s the final.