An African American Woman Laments On How The Day To Day Dis Can Really Take Its Toll
By Brenda Payton
IT WAS SUNDAY. My husband and I had been for a short bike ride and we'd stopped at the grocery store to pick up something to cook for dinner. I begged off going into the store and waited for him in the car.
I opened the car door, basking in the sun and the Latin jazz rhythms on the radio.
I'd been sitting there for maybe 10 minutes. Other shoppers had come and gone. A woman got out of her SUV and started walking toward the store. A white woman. She saw me sitting in the car and turned back, pushing the remote button to lock her car. She proceeded into the store.
Seeing me and locking her car may have been completely unrelated. She may have been planning to lock it and just happened to look in my direction before she did. However, I couldn't shake the feeling she had seen me, an African American sitting in a car, and decided she'd better lock her doors.
For a moment, I could feel myself getting angry. "I'm not going to let some idiot ruin this beautiful day," I thought. But I looked at her when she returned to her car. And clearly, I didn't forget the incident.
It was a classic example of mundane extreme environmental stress, so named by Grace Carroll, a longtime Oakland, California resident, who holds a doctorate in the sociology of education and last year published a booklet "M.E.E.S. and Me: Musings of a Mad Matriarch."
"Black people live in a different social reality than the majority," she said. "Minute things happen every single day that put us in a mindset. And we have so many more important things to think about. Dealing with it is stressful."
Part of the stress is not knowing for sure. Was the woman locking her door because she thought an African-American woman was a threat? Or was she simply locking her door as usual?
Carroll said she is convinced the higher incidence and greater severity of illnesses among African Americans is linked to this daily stress. Indeed, in 2005 a report presented to the American Heart Association linked increased risk of cardiovascular disease in African-American women with discrimination.
More>>>