Why We Can’t Breathe

Every day of quarantine, I have set the goal of studying two hours in the morning for a national psychology licensing exam. I’ve been able to meet that goal, with a few exceptions. In mid-March, I started experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, and it was way too hard to focus on a computer screen without getting a massive migraine, let alone digest any information when all my body wanted to do was sleep.

Then there was this week. I sat to engage in study when two stories came to my attention. In one, Amy Cooper (a White woman) threatened Christian Cooper (a Black man) in a New York City park with a promise to call the police. But it didn’t end there—she evoked his race in the call, apparently as a means of heightening the stakes of his fear.

In another case, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, was asphyxiated by the force of a White police officer’s knee to his neck. With several Black onlookers pleading with the police officers to change their behavior, you could hear and see the disbelief when George’s life was snuffed out in front of their eyes.

These cases—in addition to those which surfaced during the time of quarantine, including Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor—have given me pause. I had to stop studying and look out the window for a period of time. Had to call Black male friends to tell them they matter and are loved. And had to wonder why my chest is so tight from all this news.

So I decided I would put some of my knowledge from this test to good use.

In short, there are three reasons why breathing is harder for many Black people right now than in the past:

1. ‪COVID-19: Yes, just a reminder that the inequality in so many things (including environmental conditions that lead to asthma) has also led to Black people contracting, transmitting, and perishing from this respiratory system-attacking disease at higher rates than others. People can’t really grasp what it’s like, but for perspective, I used to work out four times a week. When I was sick, I had symptoms that were not severe and did not directly impact my ability to breathe and I still cannot go up a flight of steps without being winded. I am in month two of recovery.
2. Intentional restriction of air: Whether it's a banned chokehold or kneeling on a person's neck, the forceful and intentional deprivation of air most certainly limits the ability of Black people subjected to it to get air into their lungs.
3. Constant triggering of the sympathetic nervous system: Our fight-fright-or flight mechanism, which is a useful system for both determining the severity of a threat and then acting on it, is a part of the sympathetic nervous system (or SNS). The SNS is a component of the autonomic nervous system, which, as you might be able to deduce from the name, regulates a series of automatic processes that we often take for granted, including breathing. But if Black people are constantly on guard from every news story, siren, or police encounter, the SNS may be consistently activated, leading to eroded physiological and psychological processes (e.g., heightened cortisol and stress responses) and dysregulated breathing. The alternative, though, is to become habituated (or used to) such phenomena, which can also have negative health outcomes for Black people.

So, when you hear the words “I can’t breathe,” please know that they may be more than metaphorical. There are forces literally choking the air out of Black people. The meta-cognition of having to read about respiratory regulation while hearing about Black people being unable to breathe has been a bit too much to handle. I think I’ll put down the study guide today and focus on some deep breathing exercises myself.