Wizdom Powell, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychiatry and the director of the Health Disparities Institute at UConn Health, part of the University of Connecticut in Farmington. In this opinion piece, she discusses racial battle fatigue, a reality for many Black Americans, in the context of July 4 and calls for a commitment to radical healing by the wider society.
In the United States, July 4 marks the formal adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in 1776.
It is well known that while America was embracing this conceivably unifying social contract, almost all Black Americans were still enslaved. These cognitively dissonant realities have been the subject of numerous essays, books, speeches, and artistic expressions.
Extant writings focus largely on Black Americans’ espoused conflicts over commemorating this now more than 242-year-old holiday. Although these works detail important sources of conflicting feelings about July 4, they inadvertently reify stereotypic depictions of Black Americans as less patriotic.
Such depictions are notably challenging to reconcile with Black America’s civic engagement “receipts.”
For example, less patriotic people do not serve in the military, fight in wars to protect embryonic democracies, pay taxes, exercise their voting rights, or risk their NFL careers to symbolically hold America accountable for its social contract breaches.
But perhaps more troubling than these single stories is their tendency to mute, obscure, or pathologize collectively experienced racial battle fatigue, which lies at the root of Black America’s presumed disaffection for July 4.
Racial battle fatigue among many Black Americans is likely at its peak after months of required physical distancing, mounting and disproportionately higher COVID-19 deaths in their communities, and the recent killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Dreasjon Reed, Elijah McClain, and George Floyd.
The combined impact of COVID-19 and racism is brewing what Poteat and colleagues describe as a lethal force of mental health syndemics — or the social patterning of co-occurring disease conditions across place and time.
By itself, COVID-19 has all the ingredients of a trauma pandemic in the making — the overwhelming sense or experience of threat, uncontrollability, death, and extended periods of social isolation.
However, the kind of racialized violence spurring the entire world to unanimously proclaim Black Lives Matter has trauma-inducing properties all of its own.
In fact, the American Psychological Association devoted a 2019 special issue to exploring the manifestations, mechanisms, and impacts of racial trauma or the biopsychosocial symptoms and responses associated with acute and chronic exposure to race-based stress, injury, life threatening events, or violence ending in death.
Emerging evidence further affirms that bearing witness to racially violent events online can produce trauma symptomatology among Black and Latinx adolescents.
There is also a litany of clear and convincing scientific evidence that racism, in all its perverse and myriad forms, negatively affects psychological functioning and well-being.
Black Americans are emotionally exhausted. This article, however, is not about providing acontextual strategies designed to help Black Americans find hope or cope with racial battle fatigue or racial trauma. It is certainly not about providing another opportunity for voyeuristic indulgence in Black pain.
Rather, this article is about legitimizing that pain and issuing a call to action, because what Black Americans need now more than ever, to be emotionally whole, is for health systems, structures, and poli