Struck Numb: The Growing Desensitization to Black Death in America

This article is an online version of the print article for the A/W ‘20 Lexington Line edition. The print version can be viewed here!

Despite being around police officers as a child and viewing them as his friends, Anthony Kelley quickly realized the color of his skin made him susceptible to racial violence.

“I remember one instance during my rookie year with the Houston Astros—I was going to the ballpark,” Kelley recounts. “In the process of me jogging to the park, police pulled up on me, pulling guns on me, telling me to get up on the wall. They said someone had just robbed a store, and ‘you look suspicious of doing something like that.’ I told them that I just came from my house. I had to tell them who I was, but in the process, I’m being janked up, pressed up against the wall, guns drawn. I come to find out the store was a mile over on the other side of town from where I was. So, how do I look suspicious? It’s just certain things that happen to African Americans for no reason.”

These situations are all too familiar within the Black community, and while Kelley’s encounter with the police is appalling, he felt a sense of relief since he lived to tell his story. He didn’t lose his life like countless other Black men and women. This endless list of names causes Black death to be normalized at an accelerating rate and is rooted in the dehumanization of Black people.

The harrowing anticipation of another loss at the hands of the police is felt throughout the Black community. Police violence is expected, and it has serious consequences for the mental health of Black America.

Kelley, who grew up on the west side of Chicago in the 1970s, has borne witness to the power and authority police violently project onto specific communities. After retiring from professional baseball, he became a mental health professional who now works with inmates as a mental health manager and as a therapist for foster kids and their families.

Due to his background, Kelley is especially attuned to the mental and emotional damage police brutality inflicts. Psychologically, people form immunity towards recurring traumatic situations. This is why Black people live in a constant state of survival.

“African Americans and POC—they learn to live with trauma,” Kelley says. “You learn to live with not having enough. POC deal with survival mode; others are just living. They’re living and have what they need. But when you’re dealing with POC, they’re in survival mode all the time.”

According to a ProPublica analysis, young Black men are 21 times more likely to die from the use of deadly force by police than their white counterparts. Additionally, 60% of Black women killed by the police are unarmed.

When you’re born Black, you become aware at a young age that Black lives are not valued like white lives are, and this naturally affects how you view yourself and your own life.

Obbi Myrtil, a 2019 LIM graduate who obtained his MPS in Global Fashion Supply Chain Management, testifies to how his core identity has been impacted by recurring instances—whether it be moments when he was targeted specifically or a looming sense of being surveilled—due to being Black.

“I’m continuously reminded that technically, to these people, I’m not fully human,” Myrtil says. “I’m like subhuman. But I’m 99.9% like you. I fear, I think, I dream, I hope, I love. My fear shouldn’t have to include you every waking moment of the day.”

Living in Canada for several years as a young child caused Myrtil to initially perceive police officers as neighborhood heroes, but as he grew up in Long Island during his adolescence, his encounters with the police ranged from being pulled out of the car and interrogated when a white woman was driving to having five officers draw their guns on him.

In contrast to Myrtil’s experiences with the police, Judiah Jackson, who graduated from Curry College earlier this year with a degree in Criminal Justice, explained how cops have been extremely vile and rude to him, but that he wouldn’t classify the occurrences as racially-motivated. Most of his encounters with racism have been with regular people, including three white coworkers who would say the n-word in front of him.

Various forms of media, specifically television shows and news organizations, have embedded biased views of Black people and their communities into the minds of non-Black Americans. These perceptions help fuel and justify the police violence unleashed on Black men and women across this country.

According to a Rutgers School of Public Health study published in Research in Race and Ethnic Relations, negative portrayals in the news media affect how the police treat Black men. It was also noted that Black masculinity is often associated with criminality.

Jackson has witnessed traumatic events within his own community that further push the narrative of Black Americans being criminals and deemed dangerous.

“Growing up in the hood, I’ve seen drug addicts and people get shot,” he explains. “I also had a lot of friends that were in the streets. I think everybody in the world views Black people as just ‘street,’ which is terrible. I’m just aware. I’m aware of what our identity in American society is.”

Many Black people across this country, especially in inner cities, have become numb to the anguish that engulfs them.

“If that’s all you know and you’ve always lived in that way, what is the alternative to that when you don’t see any way out?” Kelly asks. “And those are questions that a lot of Black people have.”

In a 2019 journal published by Psychology & Cognitive Sciences Open Journal, Dr. Stephanie N. Williams and Dr. Annette V. Clark write, “The frequent exposure to the shootings of Black people can cause trauma. This trauma has been coined ‘race-based trauma,’ and it argues that people of color experience mental distress similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when viewing police violence against Black communities.”

The trauma accumulated from being Black in America is continuously left untreated due to a lack of affordable mental health resources in Black communities, as well as stigmas around mental illnesses that are heavily reinforced from a cultural standpoint. In addition, African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to fear mental health treatment than their white counterparts, according to a report from the Surgeon General. The historical context of oppression and systemic racism also plays a factor in the exclusions Black people endure regarding primary and mental health care providers.

Due to high levels of untreated trauma, Black individuals begin to associate situations that would usually cause one to feel a deep sense of anguish as their own version of normalcy.

“It’s just common everyday occurrences that are traumatic events, but POC don’t see it like that,” Kelley explains. “It’s an everyday thing. Even with the George Floyd situation, that wasn’t unusual for five police officers to tackle someone in the neighborhood like that. What was unusual was for you to kill him right in front of me.”

George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in May 2020 over the assumption that he used a counterfeit $20 bill. The murder, which bystanders caught on video, ignited protests around the world.

Kelley continues, “And to kill me over something like that? Over these minor things? That’s where the problem is coming in.”

The normalization of Black death at the hands of the police has resulted in the “deadening of our collective senses,” according to The New Republic. Additionally, it leads to the numbing of our consciousness when consuming media regarding another loss of Black life. Our reaction becomes less and less exasperated, and one begins to anticipate when another Black person will be killed by the police. It becomes expected.

The systemic oppression and racism felt by the Black community are rooted in all aspects of society that have plagued generations extending from the time of enslavement. And yet, some would like to remain oblivious, and some even seek to delegitimize the issue.

One tragedy that greatly affected Myrtil was the hunt and murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery by two white men in Brunswick, Georgia. Arbery was killed while jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood; Myrtil knows how easily it could have been him.

“I run in neighborhoods that aren’t mine, at parks that aren’t mine,” he says. “Parks that have statues of men that are celebrated for killing, raping, and testing my grandmothers, my Black sisters. I’m always reminded of that, but then seeing something like that—seeing someone get away with that for as long as they did—for them to not get an adequate punishment for outright discrimatory murder, it was like watching modern-day Emmett Till.”

Black death has been a public spectacle from the beginning of American history. White families would gather around and look in awe during public lynchings, and now viral videos of violence against Black men and women are reinforcing the same narrative. While the medium and intent may have changed, Black death is still being consumed by the masses.

The result is that Black death has become a commodity. It’s so permanent that it enhances the profitability of certain businesses and companies. Someone is always going to cash in.

“For generations, they have desensitized Black men in America,” Jackson states. “It’s normal. I don’t mean normal in a good way, but we’ve been desensitized through movies; through music, through everything. We’ve been desensitized to Black killings; now it’s just on the forefront, and people have to deal with it.”

It’s dehumanizing. It’s dehumanizing to see Black people shown on full display in the event of their tragic death. It’s dehumanizing to see white people make excuses to justify why the police shot and killed another Black person. It’s dehumanizing that Black people have to scream at the top of their lungs that their lives matter and that they don’t deserve to be persecuted.

Sharing and repeatedly viewing videos of police brutality retraumatizes Black people in a hope for a structural change that has yet to come. Kelley emphasizes how older Black people have been witnessing these murders for generations and that the viral videos are simply placing a spotlight on what’s already been happening for centuries.

“This has been going on for years, but no one wants to believe this because it doesn’t happen in their neighborhoods,” Kelley explains. “Your mother has never been raped by massa, but my mother has, my grandmother, my great-great-grandmothers have. Your mother has never been in the cotton fields, but my great-great-grandma and her mothers have.”

Rage, frustration, and grief can consume the Black community to the point of despair. There is no time to process or comprehend what ensued before the next violent tragedy happens. Rather, institutions that were purposefully designed to exclude certain groups of marginalized people are still in effect, and structural transformation is needed to ensure minorities are not further oppressed.

There is no one solution or easy fix. It requires dissecting systemic racism and the extensive history of law enforcement that upholds white supremacy. It requires asking why the police have a budget that accumulates to a far greater sum than the funding of education, housing, mental health resources, healthcare, and youth services in lower income communities.

“Somebody has the resources, but not in my neighborhood,” Kelley says. “The playing field has to be level, and it’s not… [The police] don’t need what they brought out in Missouri, but who do you see them use that type of ammunition on? People of color. You’ve never seen protests or demonstrations with whites in there where they brought tanks out and held shotguns to their heads. Never seen it.But they do a great job of beating us down, kicking us, and we see it every day. We see it every day.”