When Fear Goes Mainstream
There is a reckoning happening right now. Many white Americans are experiencing fear, anger, and disillusionment that feel new and destabilizing. For Black people, this emotional terrain is not new. It is familiar. Inherited. Something we have carried quietly, learned to manage, and often learned to mask just to survive.
When 🧊 appeared in the streets of Minnesota, it did not register as law and order to Black communities. It never has. The presence of armed authority has never offered reassurance. It activates memory. It activates history. It confirms what we already know: protection has always been selective.
This is the same dissonance we feel when we see the words “protect and serve” printed across police vehicles. We understand the slogan. We also understand the distance between those words and our lived reality. We know they were never meant for us.
For generations, Black people have learned how to function inside systems not designed for our safety. We learned to read rooms quickly. To regulate our tone. To stay calm while afraid. To keep moving while angry. To raise children with both hope and warning in the same breath.
What is different now is not the presence of fear. It is who is being asked to hold it.
For many white Americans, it took the murder of an innocent white man, someone widely perceived as gentle, compliant, and emblematic of the best of humanity, for this reality to register. For Black people, this feeling has returned again and again each time a Black person has been killed by law enforcement. The fear, the grief, the rage, the helplessness are not new. They are echoes.
The government has been killing Black Americans for generations. Not accidentally. Not ambiguously. With consistency, protection, and repetition. Each time, the same defenses are raised. Each time, the same excuses are offered. Each time, Black grief is met with skepticism instead of solidarity.
This violence is reinforced from the top down. Through official statements, press briefings, and carefully rehearsed talking points, institutions work to control the narrative when harm occurs. Even when video evidence is clear, the response is predictable: delay, deflect, dehumanize.
Words like “protocol,” “authorized force,” and “under investigation” are used to drain urgency from public outrage. Timelines are slowed. Context is selectively introduced to cast doubt on victims. Responsibility is fractured until accountability disappears. This is not confusion. It is design.
Philando Castile had a permit to carry. He disclosed it calmly. He followed instructions. He did everything the mythology says should keep someone alive. And he was still killed. His death made one thing unmistakable: compliance has never been the protection Black Americans are promised.
Since the most recent escalation, 🧊 has killed people across multiple states. Most Americans do not know their names. Their deaths did not dominate headlines. Their families did not receive national mourning. Loss was processed quietly, efficiently, and without consequence.
Yet nearly everyone knows the names Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Their deaths pierced the public consciousness in a way others did not, not because their lives mattered more, but because their innocence fit a narrative white America could recognize itself in.
As a small business owner, I cannot take paid time off. Fear does not pause my responsibilities. The terror inflicted by 🧊 is not abstract for me, it is embodied. And still, every day, I show up. I unlock the door. I hold space for my clients. I regulate myself so others can feel safe.
As a Black woman in America, this is terrifying. But it is also familiar. This is not new fear. It is heightened fear. The difference now is that white Americans are activated because the threat has reached them, because safety no longer feels guaranteed.
For Black people, fear has never required permission to exist. We have built lives, businesses, and families inside it long before the rest of the country decided it was real.
Had Americans listened sooner, had they believed Black communities when we named this violence as systemic, none of these people had to die. Not the unnamed. Not the named. Not the ones whose deaths finally made it impossible to look away.
The question now is not whether you feel afraid. The question is what you will do with that fear. Whether you will demand accountability even when it is uncomfortable. Whether you will stay present after your own sense of safety is restored. And whether Black lives will continue to be treated as acceptable collateral once this moment passes.
