karnythia:

npr:

“We hear in the news about African-Americans being shot in a church, and this brings up all sorts of other things and experiences,” says Monnica Williams, director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Louisville. “Maybe that specific thing has never happened to us. But maybe we’ve had uncle or aunts who have experienced things like this, or we know people in our community [who have], and their stories have been passed down. So we have this whole cultural knowledge of these sorts of events happening, which then sort of primes us for this type of traumatization.”

I’m actually struggling with this a bit myself. Sometimes I just can’t know the news.

I have definitely been feeling the emotional effects of the stories of police brutality and racism for over six months now. I try to maintain my energy so I can go about my day-to-day, and sometimes that means cutting myself off (literally or emotionally) from new developments and victims. Which brings its own negative feelings around not caring or doing enough. But I need to work. I need to live. I need to be capable of interacting with white people on a daily basis.

I remember accidentally watching the Eric Harris video on someone else’s screen while flying once. I couldn’t stop watching, even though I knew I needed to. I started sobbing 36,000 miles above this racist fucking country.