What happened this past winter caught me by surprise. Stepping from my car at a hip coffee shop in Carrboro, North Carolina, the first words I heard were that most potent of racial slurs for Black Americans, repeated angrily from a nearby vehicle. I tried to ignore the harassment, but on the third shriek, I turned around. A hairy arm shot out of the passenger side of a green pickup, and an angry male voice yelled, “White power!” as the truck sped away.
I continue to reflect on the lasting significance of that brief moment. In communities of color, hardship goes hand in hand with triumph. The regular experiences of discrimination – intentional or unintentional – create a pressure that sometimes feels inescapable. The toxic stress of systemic and interpersonal racism takes a significant, measurable toll on a person’s well-being. Despite this, people of color continue to create the rich, multilayered tapestry of American heritage.
What I experienced that day was routine when my mother was growing up in the South in the 1950s, but it was an aberration in my lived experience. Following the slur, I looked around and saw that I was the only non-White person in the vicinity.
Cognitively, my brain wanted to write the slur off as irrelevant. Logically, I reasoned that an anonymous stranger screaming from a passing vehicle had nothing to do with me. But my body disagreed. I felt a tightness in my throat and stomach. Such an intense physical reaction to stress isn’t necessarily momentary.
Whether explicit or implicit, racial bias creates an additive, lifelong stress experience that has a cumulative impact on our bodies. Scientists call this phenomenon the “allostatic load.” Everyone confronts stress, but when environmental challenges build on one another without relief, they can overwhelm a person’s capacity to cope. This is called “allostatic overload” – a state which can suppress the immune system, damage the cardiovascular system, contribute to diabetes, impair cognitive function and more. Tragically, children of color begin to take on this burden at an early age. Exposure to racism is one of the adverse childhood experiences that can ultimately lead to health problems in adulthood.
To learn more about the effects of the allostatic load on communities of color and the steps we can take to manage the chronic stress that unfolds, read Dr. Nora Dennis’s full LinkedIn article here.
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