By JaLoni Owens

About a month ago, a video of thousands of New Yorkers fleeing Times Square after a motorcycle backfire was mistaken for gunshots went viral. The conclusion drawn by the Twitterverse was that the video depicted post-traumatic stress disorder on a national scale—that this video candidly exposed what the damage of living in a nation plagued by gun violence had done to the national psyche.

I remember seeing the video for the first time and instantly retweeting it. I was horrified by the commonality of mass gun violence and reeling from my anger at the inaction of our government to address the issue at its root—white supremacist patriarchy.

When the video resurfaced on my timeline a second time, a user took the liberty of explaining that the panic now being recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder in the general population (read: white folks) has been long seen in Black and brown folks. A widely circulated example of this being Black men instinctively running from the police in an attempt to get to safety, just before being shot in their backs anyway. This community-wide trauma is consistently on display, clogging up our Twitter timelines, typically without it being named as post-traumatic stress disorder. Only when white folks live in fear of gun violence, state sanctioned and individually perpetrated, does the issue warrant analysis of its impact on the national psyche.

While attending A Disability Justice Primer, a workshop on navigating identity and oppression by Dustin P. Gibson at CUNY School of Law, Mr. Gibson projected a bidirected graph to the room of first year law students that read “Trauma is a cause and consequence of disability…Poverty is a cause and consequence of trauma…Violence is a cause and consequence of poverty.”

It dawned on me that I couldn’t articulate the feelings I got when reading that recontextualization of that video because even as debilitating as I’ve described my own PTSD and anxiety to be, I never once classified it as a disability or disability adjacent. It had never occurred to me that any access-centered world we build should terminate the cycle of inherited and acquired traumas of Black communities that continue to leave Black households more vulnerable to poverty and to varying forms of violence.

It was so easy for my brain to identify post traumatic stress disorder and symptomatic responses as I observed thousands of people running for their lives in Times Square. However, I struggled and continue to struggle to see it as I observe the consequences and detect the origins of transgenerational traumas and my individual traumas because I’ve reduced both to “that’s just what it means to be Black.”

To be Black is to live in a perpetual fight or flight. We may choose flight when we hear gunshots in our neighborhoods or we may choose to pick up a gun and fight for our families and defend them from the threat outside our doors. We may choose flight when police approach us on the street and use excessive force or we may choose to instead assert our right to live lives free of state sanctioned racist violence.

Sometimes we choose flight because we believe that that’s how we survive the routine tribulations of this racialization and sometimes we choose to fight because survival just isn’t cutting it. Each breath taken by a Black person living in these conditions is only taken after a calculated decision is made to prevent the interruption of that breath. Our racialization denies us the involuntariness of breath. We have to fight for and win each and every inhale and exhale. This state of being weighs heavy on our mental health and well-being. 

Without intending to, I subconsciously isolated Blackness from disability as if our history and our present doesn’t reflect that—as if the term “disabled” is not perpetually expanding and contracting to accommodate a plethora of other experiences. In holding myself accountable for how I’ve neglected the intersection of race and disability, I had to fill in the gaps in my history not just in terms of mental disability but also physical.

I had to recenter Harriet Tubman’s disability caused by a traumatic head injury resulting from a violent beating by her master. In the story of how she led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom. I had to acknowledge that a Black, disabled, formerly enslaved woman liberated hundreds. I had to recenter Emmett Till’s childhood polio, his mother’s role in his rehabilitation, and his well-documented speech impediment, which made certain words have a whistle-like quality to them. In the story of his murder. I had to acknowledge that the lynchings of Black boys are more often than not also inspired by ableism.

I had to recenter those who crawled to freedom because they could not walk. I had to recenter those with debilitating mental illnesses with no hope of relief because they were not eligible for the care white middle class and upper class folks were given without blinking twice. I had to reconstruct and reimagine the abolitionist movement, the (Black) feminist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war / peace movement, and even the current movement for Black lives. I had to make the space necessary to hold the fluidity and complexity of Blackness, disability, and their intersections before I could even begin to address the erasure of Black trauma from discussions about disability justice. 

In doing so, I’m prepared to approach the definition of disability as determined by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which defines a disabled person as being a person “who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity…[including] people who have a record of such an impairment, even if they do not currently have a disability.”

While I am consistently among the first to say that assuming legal definitions of lived experiences are absolute truths often undermines Black feminist praxis (see Google’s definition of racism), I also believe that there are a handful of these definitions that if read and understood would actually expose some gaps in our politics. The legal definitions for disability and disabled person(s) are among these definitions.

Being racialized as Black in Western contexts inherently limits our ability to perform major life activities. Being Black has done so since 1619, both mentally and physically as the examples above demonstrate. The conditions Black people are subject to in the United States and abroad are designed to destroy us individually and collectively, white supremacy picking our bones from its teeth. If we were to poll Black people living in regions considered to be apart of the Western World alone, I’m certain that we would all agree that Blackness is as versatile and beautiful as it is enervating and demoralizing.

And this feeling is not exclusive to an isolated trigger, as is the case with the motorcycle backfire incident. This feeling may be triggered in professional spaces, in academic spaces, in social spaces, and even in our most personal or isolated spaces. This feeling is ever present. We live. We breathe. We are debilitatingly traumatized.

Now, the evolution of the term disabled does not mean that everyone is disabled and that we should all now take on that identity and appropriate related concepts. It does mean, however, that a truly radical disability justice politic requires a recontextualization of Black trauma within the landscape of disability. More than that, it requires an understanding that the debilitating natures of our collective and individual traumas are exacerbated by the continued worsening of conditions in this settler-colonial state and under global capitalism.

Reading Suggestions:

“Black Americans suffer most from racial trauma, but few counselors are trained to treat it,” Elham Khatami, ThinkProgress (2018)

“Black Americans Are Building A Space In Psychedelic Drug Culture After Being Ignored For Decades,” Elijah C. Watson, OkayPlayer (2018)

“Intergenerational trauma is gendered, and other life lessons from my Black mother & sister,” Terrence F. Chappell, Black Youth Project (2019)

“Honoring Arnaldo Rios-Soto and Charles Kinsey: Achieving Liberation Through Disability Solidarity,” Talila A. Lewis, TalilaLewis.com (2016)

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Ja’Loni is an Afro-Puerto Rican community organizer and freelance essayist. At their alma mater, Hofstra University, they served as lead organizer of the Jefferson Has Gotta Go Campaign, which demanded the removal of the campus’ statue of Thomas Jefferson. She is currently pursuing a MPA/J.D. in Public Accountability: Inspection and Oversight at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at CUNY School of Law.

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