I knew the beta blockers would help. For the last two years, I tried to explain to cardiologist what I was experiencing. Since 1973 to 2005, I was on a beta blocker, Inderal, for more than half that time. I was born with Wolff Parkinson White (WPW), and for the last twenty years, I've been off the drug. But, like most black Americans, I've been on the receiving end of indifference.
It's the Look. I have ten minutes, maybe fifteen. How do you feel?
I feel like a child and even hear myself sound like one as I try to explain the occasional chest pains, the irregular heartbeats, the fast beats while at rest, and the shortness of breath. And then the doctor turns from the screen to face me. It's the Look that tells me I should stay in my lane.
I suffered a Nstemi-Non-St-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction. Chest pains. Shortness of breath. I struggled to breathe. Doctor "Notes" from the past state that "she denies"-- everything that I stated I experienced: Chest pains. Shortness of breath. It's not that I wasn't heard; it's what I said that didn't matter.
I'm a member of the "minority".
I hate the term "minority" when it's meant to refer to non-whites in the US. It's all consuming and avoids looking at life beyond the prism of whiteness. "Minority" conceals the history of conquest, genocide, colonialism, and imperialism. In particular, it's avoiding any meaningful refection on American history as it relates to the existence and lives of black Americans. For there's a certain indifference reserved for black Americans. When whites look at black Americans an ugly past emerges, one that threatens to topple the racial hierarchy and the myth of innocence.
No one asked the African woman hunted down and caught like an animal what was her name. What's the name of her family's lineage? If her captors did so they would have to acknowledge an African with a name, family, community. They would have to recognize the humanity of Africans. Instead, the mother, grandmother, aunt, niece, daughter becomes "Jane" and "Mary" because a people powerful enough to capture human beings considered itself powerful enough to enslave them. The powerful, in turned, created whole narratives to defend the labeling of Africans as "subhuman". "Chattel".
It begins there in that indifference to the fact that we are human beings. It begins in the violence of terrorizing Africans despite, as Imani Perry writes, pleas from King Alfonso of Kongo, begging Portugal to stop "terrorizing" his people with the "prospect of being snatched and shipped to the New World". The "theft" of human beings continued "with abandon" even while there are so many of us spread across countless plantations, generating from our free labor wealth for a rising young new nation.
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