Source: Lee Chinyama/Pexels

In 2021, the CDC declared structural racism a public health emergency, seemingly in response to the back-to-back police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. Ample evidence corroborates the CDC’s position, including a 2018 study which found that police killings of Black Americans triggered days of poor mental health among Black Americans residing in that same state, for up to three months afterward.

The Washington Post launched its Police Shooting Database in 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri shot Michael Brown, 24; before then, such specific data was inaccessible to the public. We now know that U.S. police shoot roughly 1,000 people per year—the highest rate among “developed” nations—and Black Americans constitute at least 25 to 50 percent of victims, despite comprising only 12.4 percent of the U.S. population.

What’s more, only 91 officers have been arrested for murder or manslaughter, in connection to the 6,300 Americans killed by police from 2015 to 2020. Translation: Less than 1 percent have faced charges.

Just as disheartening is the fact that the criminalization of Black individuals tends to start young. A Yale study found that preschool teachers “show a tendency to more closely observe Black students, and especially boys, when challenging behaviors are expected.” Similarly, data from the Department of Education reveals that Black girls are 5.5x more likely to be suspended than white girls.

But perhaps the most haunting statistic of all is the fact that at least half of individuals killed by police have a disability, according to the Ruderman Family Foundation. Sandra Bland, 28, had epilepsy; Eric Garner, 43, had asthma, diabetes, and a heart condition; Freddie Gray, 25, had a developmental disability from lead exposure; Osaze Osagie, 29, lived with Asperger syndrome and schizophrenia.

Not even disability offsets the dehumanization that drives anti-Black policing.

 

Source: Colin Lloyd/Unsplash

An Unspoken Public Health Crisis

The aforementioned injustices not only psychologically traumatize Black Americans; they arguably shorten the average life expectancy for Black Americans directly or vicariously traumatized.

In other words, it is likely not coincidental that Black Americans have the second-lowest life expectancy after Native peoples, while also experiencing the highest rate of biased policing, not to mention systemic anti-Blackness and colorism in courts and prisons.

Considering the myriad health disparities facing Black Americans, it makes sense to extrapolate the association between structural racism and deleterious health to disability, particularly chronic illnesses that are physically disabling.

Surprisingly, however, making the case is not as straightforward as one might assume—misconceptions about psychosomatic illness make it easy to dismiss the connection. In particular, stigma pathologizes racial trauma survivors, often labeling them as delusional conspiracy theorists or “radicals.” The clearest example of this was the emergence of “protest psychosis,” a fabricated medical diagnosis under which Civil Rights activists were involuntarily committed.

Yet it should not require a leap of imagination to consider how the trauma of racist policing may be driving the myriad health disparities plaguing Black Americans—not if we grasp the hard-wired nature of our mind-body connection, trust that trauma can cause epigenetic alterations and a dysregulated nervous system, and believe that racial trauma is a legitimate trauma.

There is also plenty of evidence linking chronic illness to racial stress, which biased policing likely induces in all targets. For instance, racial stress correlates with autoimmune disorders, hypertension, hunger and metabolism, and premature menopause.

Correspondingly, racial disparities exist for autoimmune, cardiac, endocrine (e.g. diabetes), gastrointestinal, neurological (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and sleep disorders), as well as for birth defects and infant mortality. Most disturbingly, all of these disparities are very likely exacerbated by the fact that Black patients are systematically under-treated for pain.

It may take many more years of scientific research to potentially trace the etiology of certain health disparities back to biased policing specifically; nevertheless, I argue that a correlation between disability and racist policing is highly probable.

Moreover, continuing to explore the ways in which economic, environmental, social, and structural disadvantages complicate disability is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. But we must also give as much attention to how these conditions might cause disability.