Physiology is the gold standard, not reductive racism – neurotransmitters produce anti-black gut reactions making phobias de facto, not de jure.

I will set aside the pedagogical question of how an instructor should best handle classroom situations like the one created by both Brittney’s comment and my TA’s response to it. What I want to focus on here aresome of the ethical and epistemological issues surrounding Brittney’s belief that the image of black men as threatening and frightening is real—that is, more than a cultural stereotype—and she “knows” this because of her physiological, affective response to them. She really is scared when she encounters black men, as she might have said. She was not just making it up to try to discriminate against them, and her body proved it. Since nothing is more real or irrefutable than felt physiological responses—unchosen and unwilled, after all—then her body’s alarmed response to black men means that they are frightening. Philosophy has toreckon with that reality, Brittney might have continued, and if it cannot,vthen it is a load of politically correct crap that is not worth the bother.How should critical philosophers of race respond to claims such asvthese? More specifically, how might their responses help transform whitevpeople’s racist behavior and embodied beliefs, rather than encourage themvto cling defensively to the felt certainty of their white privileged experi-ence (as I believe my TA’s response to Brittney did)? This is a difficult taskvsince, as Charles Mills states in the epigraph, white people often arevincapable of understanding their behavior as racist due to the white ignorance required by the racial contract. I believe that Brittney genu-inely did not see what was morally objectionable about her fear of blackmen. This is not solely, or perhaps even primarily a cognitive difficulty,however, as I will argue. Like most contemporary white ignorance/ knowledge, her affective “knowledge” that black men are threatening operated primarily on a non-cognitive, bodily level. 1 While I do not agree with most of what Brittney said or implied, I thinkshe is right that philosophy (and critical race theory more broadly) mustreckon with the lived reality of human physiology and affects. And this isso even—or maybe especially?—in the case of politically charged subjectssuch as white racism. To be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and critical race theory need to examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of white racism, but also its physiological operations. In societies in which de jure Jim Crow has been eliminated, white privilege continues to operate as much, if not more through human biology than through mental beliefs, hidden and “invisible” because it is a product of gut reactions rather than conscious decision or choice. 2 In dialogue with Mills, I will argue that white ignorance is more physiological than cog-nitive and that philosophical appeals to human physiology and biology need not be reductive, as they often historically have been. Critically examining the physiology of white racism can help remove a weapon from the arsenal of white domination by invalidating commonplace and sim-plistic appeals to biology to justify white supremacy and white privilege. I realize that combining the topics of physiology and biology with those of race and white domination is dangerous. The Western world has a long, destructive history of using biology reductively to justify white supremacy and related forms of oppression. Nazi Germany often is a prime example,but it is important to remember that the United States and many othercountries were engaged in eugenics in the first half of the twentiethcentury (McWhorter 2009). And nineteenth-century scientific practicessuch as craniology were created precisely for the purpose of proving theinferiority of non-white races (Gould 1981). For these reasons, positive explorations of biology and physiology have tended to be out of thequestion for contemporary critical philosophy of race and critical racetheory. Even if we utilize contemporary medical knowledge of human physiology, we cannot be certain that we are not replicating racist and sexist biases embedded in our time and place. As valid as all these concerns are, however, it would be even more dangerous for critical philosophers of race and critical race theorists to refuse to engage with the disciplines of human physiology and biology. 3 To begin, it is not the case that the medical and biological sciences necessarily produce reductive understandings of human existence. The sciences increasingly are operating with sophisticated biopsychosocial understandings of how psyche, body, and environments transact to produce human health and disease (more sophisticated understandings than many philosophers work with, in fact). 4 It is also not the case that systems of white supremacy have always heavily relied on biological arguments. Formal apartheid in South Africa (1948–1994), for example,was far more dependent on manufactured beliefs about cultural differ-ences between whites and blacks than on alleged biological hierarchies(Dubow 2010). While it is undeniable that the discipline of biology, along with related fields such as anthropology and evolutionary theory, have a nasty history of promoting white supremacy and white privilege, it can be and sometimes has been untangled from them. In cases where white supremacy relies on alleged cultural or environmental differences, pro-ceeding as if white supremacy and biology are inseparable means that we might be waging the wrong fight. 5 And in cases where biology can help us uncover some of the hidden operations of white privilege, dismissing biology as reductively racist means that we might be overlooking a powerful ally in the struggle against white domination.The result of refusing to engage the biological and medical sciences is to concede the domain of human physiology to white racism, and this is a problematic concession to make. It is to give up on any sort of critical understanding of how a person’s physiological responses to the world are constituted, and thus also might be reconstituted for the better. It is, for example, to allow a white woman’s tensed, knotted stomach at the sightof a black man to stand as an allegedly apolitical and “natural” event.Brittney’s affective and physiological responses to black men were indeedreal: she felt them, and they should not be dismissed as if they did notoccur. She was right about that. But they are not any kind of proof of asupposedly inherent threat posed by black men. Critical philosophy of raceneeds to be able to explain how both of these claims are true, and doing so requires critically approaching rather than eschewing physiology andbiology.When trying to change white people’s racist attitudes and comport-ments, critical philosophers and other theorists of race often start in thewrong place by focusing on conscious beliefs. We might think, as the earlyW. E. B. Du Bois did, that if we could just provide accurate informationthat would eliminate white people’s misconceptions about African Ameri-cans, then their mistaken belief in white supremacy would dissolve. Andif more information alone is not enough to do the trick, then it can besupplemented with moral injunctions that use guilt and shame to get white people to change their minds about people of color. In either case,faulty beliefs about people of color are the supposed culprits. But as DuBois himself later realized, white misunderstandings and ignorance of people of color are not accidental, and they are not likely to be changed by moral exhortations. A kind of racial occlusion, they are a product of white people’s unconscious racial habits, which have deep roots and are strongly invested—albeit not consciously—in maintaining the economic, psycho-logical, and global domination of people of color (Du Bois 1984, 296). White occlusions regarding people of color, and of race more broadly, are part of what Mills has called an epistemology of ignorance that enables and even requires white people to know the world in systematically distorted ways(Mills 1998, 18, 93). 6 White ignorance is not an accidental feature of the world—although itlikes to be understood in this way. If white people’s (mis)understandingsof the world seem like a product of happenstance, then they can appearrelatively harmless and easy to correct. Sure, one might say, white people might have gaps in their knowledge about people of color, but their ignorance is not significant and does not have any major impact on the world. White ignorance is much more devious and malign than thispeaceful description depicts, however. “Imagine,” as Mills urges, “anignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that isactive, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all confined to theilliterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land,indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge ” (Mills 2007, 13).Because white ignorance functions as official knowledge of “inventedOrients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondinglyfabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people whonever were—Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos,” it tends tobe extremely powerful and effective (Mills 1998, 18–19). It helps produceand secure a white-dominated world that is comfortable for, and flattering to, white people.The epistemic distortions generated by white ignorance thus do nothinder white people. In fact, they are incredibly functional: they allowwhite people to socially, psychologically, and financially thrive at theexpense of people of color (Mills 1998, 18). Yet at the same time, as Millsargues, the distortions of white ignorance morally handicap white people.They produce tremendous obstacles for the ethical behavior of whitepeople, toward people of color in particular but also toward other white people at times. 7 It is not just that the racial contract contains rigorousepistemological clauses, in other words. Its twisted epistemologicalrequirements also entail a particular moral relationship to the world thatis highly unethical. The resulting handicap is twofold. Even as they mightthrive in other respects, white people are largely incapable of behaving ethically especially with regard to racial matters, and they generallycannot see or understand themselves as unethical and thus they havelittle chance of changing their behavior for the better. According to Mills, white ignorance is primarily a cognitive dysfunc-tion. 8 Even as he insightfully examines the “microspace of the [raced]body” and the perception of black bodies in particular as “moving bubble[s]of wilderness,” white people’s distorted understandings of nonwhite bodies(and the world more generally) are never themselves described as embod-ied (1998, 51, 53). They are mental. As in the epigraph, Mills invokes thecognitive in claiming that “ white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the mostpervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, andenslavement” (Mills 1998, 19; I italicized “mental” and “cognitive,” allother italics are Mills’s). The inverted epistemology of the racial contractis “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions”requiring “a certain set of structured blindnesses and opacities” (Mills1998, 18, 19). Those blindnesses are “not, of course, due to biology, theintrinsic properties of [a white person’s] epidermis, or physical deficienciesin the white eye,” but to a pattern of white cognitive (mis)perception thatsystematically distorts the world for the ends of white domination (Mills2007, 18).In contrast with Mills, I want to invoke biology—not in the sense thatwhite people have deficiencies in their retinas or optical cones, but in thesense that their racialized blindness can be located in their opacities of their physiology—to understand the operations of white ignorance.This claim appreciates Du Bois’s shift to understanding white dominationas unconscious, which in turn resonates strongly with Mills’s vibrantdescription of white ignorance as aggressive, active, and dynamic. But itpushes further to posit that contemporary white people’s supremacist understandings of race are located not just in their unconscious habits,but also in their bodily constitution (which of course is related to uncon-scious habits). Human physiology is where a great deal of supposed non-bodily aspects of human existence is located. Philosophers (andperhaps also others) tend to be ignorant of the physiology of phenomenasuch as white racism, however, because of their general dismissal of thebody. Critical philosophers of race will make better headway against white racism if they acknowledge that it can function physiologically. By “physiologically” I mean something stronger or more specific than the phenomenological claim that white racism is embodied. White racism certainly is manifest in the embodied habits of white (and sometimes also non-white) people, and the phenomenological analysis of racial embodi-ment has developed helpful understandings of the operations of whiteprivilege and white supremacy. 9 As in the case of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,however, phenomenology’s approach to embodiment often is set in oppo-sition to the biological, psychological, and medical sciences, arguing for “aforeswearing of science” because “scientific points of view . . . are alwaysnaïve and at the same time dishonest” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, vii, ix). Thisdismissal is problematic given that white racism is bodily constitutive of more than just white people’s physical comportment, gestures, and stylesof interaction with others. White racism also can help shape white people’s biochemical make-up and activities: for example, their serotonin and other neurotransmitter levels, the activity patterns of their autonomic nervous system, their predisposition for gastric tachyarrhythmia, their levels of hormone production, and so on. We might say that the tenets of the racial contract need to be examined not just morally and epistemo-logically, but also biologically. To be fully effective, critical philosophy of race needs to be in conversation with the medical sciences: neurobiologists, gastroenterologists, psychoneuroimmunologists, and other medical and health professionals who understand human biologyand physiology well. What then do we learn from these conversations? The main focus of themedical sciences when they study race and racism tends to be on thedetrimental health effects of racial discrimination and oppression forpeople of color. For example, hypertension, high blood pressure, poorcardiovascular activity, and other physiological conditions associated withincreased mortality rates have been linked with incidents of racial hos-tility and socioeconomic stress experienced by African Americans andother racial minorities in the United States (Ryff and Singer 2003; see alsoWilliams 1999). Interestingly, what is never discussed to my knowledge isthe flipside of this research’s conclusions, namely that the relatively goodhealth of many white Americans—lower incidence of hypertension, high blood pressure, and so on—can be considered a product of white privilegerather than a neutral or “normal” physiological condition. (I will return tothis flipside shortly.) While white people sometimes are mentioned as aracial group in medical studies, they virtually never are discussed as agroup of people who systematically benefit, medically and otherwise, fromtheir race. Categories of race sometimes are used in the medical and lifesciences, in other words, and occasionally even racism is acknowledged asa problem that people of color confront, 10 but the topic of white domin-ation’s effect on white people is largely absent. And yet it hovers in the margins of at least some scientific studies,which makes it possible to hypothesize about the operations of whiteprivilege and domination in the physiology of white people. 11 Take the example of nausea, a queasy or tense feeling in the stomach that is acontrol mechanism inhibiting food intake and sometimes producing vom-iting. What is interesting about this control mechanism is that it is notmerely physiological. It also is psychological and, as psychologist R. M.Stern explains, “it [sometimes] occurs in threatening situations that have little to do with eating” (2002, 590). While perhaps initially puzzling, this characteristic of nausea turns out to make sense: when threatened, the body’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity changes in ways that decrease or even stop gastric motor activity (Stern 2002, 590). The stomach and intestines stop digesting their contents, in other words, andso it is not a good idea to keep putting food into them. In the face of a threat—which can be a toxic piece of food, or it can be a threat having nothing to do with food whatsoever—the body has a control mechanism to keep the stomach and intestines empty while they are not functioning. While the different nausea thresholds of white, Chinese, and African American people are briefly discussed in Stern’s study, topics of racism and white domination are never explicitly broached. The non-food-related “threats” that are mentioned in the study are public speaking and acting in a play. But the specific phenomenon of threat is used to explain the psychophysiology of nausea, and I suggest that racial threats, both real and perceived, fall into the category of menacing situations that can contribute to nausea. When a person feels threatened because of a racial situation, her physiology can be altered: chemical levels can change, gastromotor activity can cease impacting the absorption of nutrients that help constitute her flesh, bones and blood, etc. This is true for anyone in a threatening racial situation, whatever hisor her race.Although I am focusing here on white people, such as Brittney,who experience themselves as racially threatened, I must underscore thathistorically and presently white people themselves are the primary groupthat poses a threat to other people. White people almost exclusively arethe terrorizing force that uses race to menace people of color, not the otherway around. I am not, in other words, flattening the racial terrain with aturn to white people’s physiology, nor am I equating a perceived threat (forexample, of black men experienced by Brittney) with a real threat (forexample, of white lynchers). What I am claiming is that white dominationhas different but nonetheless constitutive effects on the biology of whitepeople and people of color and that the end of white domination willrequire not just significant financial, legal, educational, and politicalchanges, but also psychophysiological transformations. White people’s mistreatment of people of color as inherently inferior is found in all kindsof registers, not just the physiological, but it manifests itself in the latterdomain too. As long as white women’s stomachs seize up in fear of black men, we know that white privilege and white supremacy continue to “invisibly” thrive. The hidden physiological dimensions of white privilege—in this case, specifically white class privilege—also can be found in recent neurocardiological research on the heart. This claim may seem puzzling since, as mentioned above, the benefits of white privilege to white healthare never discussed to my knowledge in any current neurocardiologicalstudies. To see white privilege at work in them, one must read with an eyefor something that, in a significant respect, is not there. This does notmean, however, that white privilege is a foreign topic being artificiallyinserted into the research. It is not the case, as the familiar accusationgoes, that white racism never would have been an issue if the criticalphilosopher of race (or person of color) had not introduced it. 12 Something like a gestalt shift is necessary; we need to change what we are looking for when we read. As we will see, while the study examined below saysnothing about the health effects of white privilege for middle and upperclass white people, the topic simultaneously is included, written with the very same words that do not speak of it. Dubbed the “heart brain” because of its sophisticated intrinsic nervoussystem, which “enables it to learn, remember, and make functional deci-sions independent of the cranial brain,” the heart affects not just thebody’s autonomic regulation, but also its emotional processing (McCraty and Childre 2004, 232). Afferent neuronal signals travel from the heart tothe brain, affecting the central nucleus of the amygdala, which is a keyemotional center (McCraty and Childre 2004, 233, 235). This means thatfolk associations of the heart with love, compassion, and spirituality canbe understood as more than metaphorical or figurative (McCraty andChildre 2004, 230). These other-directed emotions and states of being areassociated with both an appreciative openness to the world and a com-plementary sense that the world is open to you. Both experiences of openness, moreover, are correlated with a physically healthy heart brain. A heart brain that is functioning optimally is the physical manifestationof an open relationship to the world.Evidence of the heart brain’s optimal functioning can be found in therhythms and patterns of a person’s heart rate, as indicated by itstachograms (indicating heartbeats per minute) and its power spectraldensity (indicating the frequency, or the specific electric current, of thebeating heart) (McCraty and Childre 2004, 237). Consider three differentcases: one of negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, or anger; amore neutral case of relaxation; and finally a case of positive emotionssuch as appreciation. As we will see, the terms “negative” and “positive”here correspond with the harmful or beneficial physiological effects of various emotional states. For example, when a person is angry, her heartrate tends to be fast, erratic, and characterized by rhythms in the lowfrequency band of the power spectrum (0.0033–0.04 hertz). This type of heart rate decreases parasympathetic activity in the ANS (autonomicnervous system), which is significant because the parasympathetic branchof the ANS regulates sleeping, digesting, and other bodily activitiesassociated with rest and relaxation (McCraty and Childre 2004, 233). If the balance in the ANS tips too often away from the parasympathetic andtoward the sympathetic branch, the latter of which stimulates “fight orflight” responses to danger, the body does not have enough time or energyto renew and repair itself. The result of this imbalance tends to be healthproblems associated with chronic anxiety and stress, such as cardiovas-cular disease and antecedent conditions such as hypertension (Malpas2010). In contrast, when a person is relaxed and not angry, her heart ratepattern tends to be relatively slow, less erratic, and marked by increasedpower in the high frequency band (0.15–0.4 hertz). Correspondingly,parasympathetic activity in the brain also increases (McCraty and Childre2004, 237).The sympathetic branch of the ANS should not be thought of as simplyopposed to the parasympathetic branch, however. The relationshipbetween the two branches actually is one of complementarity since theconstant, basic activity of the sympathetic branch is crucial to the body’sability to maintain its internal stability (homeostasis). Thus, the idealphysiological situation is for the two branches to be synchronized, and this takes place when the heart rate is highly ordered and smooth. This typeof heart rate tends to occur when a person feels positive emotions such asappreciation. When a person experiences the emotion of appreciation orgratitude, her parasympathetic activity increases and coordinates withthe activities of the sympathetic branch. The rhythms of the appreciativeheart are not identical to those of the relaxed heart, however. While bothare marked by increased parasympathetic activity in comparison to theangry heart, the appreciative heart oscillates at a different frequency(0.04–0.14 hertz, centering around 0.1), one that allows better resonanceand coherence across different physiological systems.When a person feels grateful or appreciative, her entire biologicalsystem tends to pulse in smooth coordination with itself. The result of such synchronization is health benefits such as “increased efficiency influid exchange, filtration and absorption between the capillaries andtissues” and other physiological changes that increase “systemwide energyefficiency and metabolic energy savings” (McCraty and Childre 2004, 238).Sometimes this event is described subjectively as an experience of increased “flow,” of clarity, creativity and invigoration in which blockagesand barriers in one’s life have (at least temporarily) dissolved (McCratyand Childre 2004, 231–32). The feeling is one of possibilities opening up,along with the physical and emotional energy to pursue them. As acorresponding study argues, while negative emotions “narrow people’sideas about possible actions,” positive emotions “widen the scope of atten-tion, broaden repertoires of desired actions, . . . and increase openness tonew experiences” (Fredrickson 2008, 450). This can be a spiritual experi-ence for some, in which one feels an increased connection with otherpeople and the world at large. Whether spiritual or not, however, positiveemotions such as appreciation have been linked scientifically to increasedphysiological efficiency, “substantiat[ing] what many people have long intuitively known: positive emotions bolster one’s ability to meet life’schallenges with grace and ease, optimize cognitive capacities, sustainconstructive and meaningful relationships with others, and foster goodhealth” (McCraty and Childre 2004, 249).So, the primary study’s authors ask, why are not more people doing something to pursue positive emotions on a day-to-day basis? Theiranswer provides a trigger for the gestalt shift needed to reveal white classprivilege: Why do genuine positive emotional experiences remain transient and unpre-dictable occurrences for most people? We propose that a main factor under-lying this discrepancy is a fundamental lack of mental and emotionalself-management skills. In other words, people generally do not make effortsto actively infuse their daily experiences with greater emotional qualitybecause they sincerely do not know how. (McCraty and Childre 2004, 241) The authors proceed to offer a number of feedback techniques, or “inter- ventions,” that can improve emotional experience by increasing awarenessof and altering heart rates and frequencies. These can be sophisticated“heart math” techniques or as simple as deep breathing exercises, whichmodulate the heart’s rhythm and thus can change one’s emotional-neurological state (McCraty and Childre 2004, 243–46, 236).The authors’ suggestions are intriguing, and in many respects theiroverall research program integrating emotions, cardio-physiology, andneurology is both medically and philosophically important. It provides aconcrete example of how to non-reductively appreciate the medical-physiological aspects of human emotional life. But it is woefully focused onthe individual isolated from the social-political world, which enables theauthors to offer extremely whitewashed guidance for improving humanemotional-cardio health. By “whitewashed,” I mean saturated with whiteclass privilege. Whether or not the authors are white or come from classprivileged backgrounds (I do not know, nor is it necessarily important toknow), their interventions implicitly address only the emotional-cardiodifficulties of middle- and upper-class white human beings, and excludethose of non-white people. They focus on people who are not regulartargets of white racism and who do not daily benefit from the “invisible”ease and comfort in life provided by white class privilege. In that way, theauthors’ suggestions suffer from white solipsism, erasing or ignoring thelives and health of those who are not white.To better see the white class privilege at work in this study, let usconsider an all-too-common experience for African Americans of being presumed to be criminal. George Yancy powerfully describes the phenom-enon of hearing the click of a car door being locked by a white person inside when he or she sees a black person on the street. Much more than just a simple sound, the click is “part of a racial and racist web of significance” that constructs “the occupants’ sense of themselves as ‘safe’(and white) [which] is purchased at the expense of denigrating the blackbody as unsafe” (Yancy 2012, 31). If the clicks could speak, we could hearthem establish the ontological stability and epistemological credibility of white identity: “ Click (innocent) . . . Click (reliable). Click ( our whitespace) . . . Click (civilized). Click (law abiding)” (Yancy 2012, 31). Whitepeople’s security and comfort is established in opposition to the dangerousblack person, “fragment[ing] my existence and cut[ting] away at myintegrity,” as Yancy explains (Yancy 2012, 33). The same clicks proclaim-ing white goodness simultaneously tell him and all black people—for theytoo can hear the clicks outside the car—that they are subpersons: “ Click (thug), click (criminal), click (thief)” and, ultimately, “ Click , click, click,click, click (nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger)” (Yancy 2012, 33).This is not an isolated or atypical experience for black people in theUnited States. In addition to the clicking experience, there is the elevator effect—again powerfully described by Yancy—in which white women aloneonanelevatorvisiblytenseupwhenablackmangetsonboard(Yancy2008,5).As mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay, Brent Staples alsowrites of the handbag-clutching march white women assume when they seehim on the street (Staples 1986, 54). Cornel West documented his experi-ence with the police when he was Driving While Black, that is, stoppedthree times in ten days for driving too slowly in an upscale residential area(Yancy2012,44–45;seealsoWest1993,x–xi).Andontheflipside,TimWise,a white man, describes the surprise on a white police officer’s face whenWise rolled down the darkened window of his beat-up, anti-David-Duke-bumper-stickered car when he was stopped for no apparent reason (dis-cussed in Yancy 2012, 45–46; see also Wise 2005, 39).As the shocked officer fumbled to find an explanation for pulling Wise over, it was clear to Wisethat he was targeted because his car marked him as black. Finally, there isthe corresponding, ubiquitous experience of black people’s being tailed bystore clerks or plainclothes officers when they do their shopping. As Yancyexplains, the “presumptive innocence” granted to white people spares themthis unnerving and infuriating experience. A white person “can walk intostores [or drive down the street] without anyone doubting the integrity of his [or her] character and intentions” (Yancy 2012, 164).These incidents might seem (to white people) minor, even trivial—afterall, there are no physical or legal obstacles to a black person’s entering anelevator or a store, for example, and traveling to the desired floor ormaking the needed purchases. What is the big deal about an unfriendlyclerk or an uptight elevator companion? The answer is that in thecumulative effect of seemingly small details such as these lies a particularworld that black people are forced to inhabit, one that is substantiallydifferent than the world inhabited by white people. The worlds of whiteand black people are not always, or perhaps ever the same, even thoughblack and white people might inhabit (sometimes, anyway) the samephysical space. “To be white in a white world,” as Yancy reveals, “is to beextended by that world’s contours. The world opens up, reveals itself as aplace called home, a place of privileges and immunities, a space forachievement, success, freedom of movement” (Yancy 2012, 45).The world generally is not open to black people in this way. Even whenthey are not, for example, tailed by a clerk or stopped by a cop on a givenday, the possibility that they could be is ever present, adding to everyexcursion into the public sphere an element of anxiety. As Yancy explains, black people are “exposed to a daily enactment of white racialized drama” that undercuts their efforts to “secur[e] existential and psychological safety in a white racist world” (Yancy 2012, 156). Whether in a store, atwork or school, or merely walking down the street, they do not get toarrive on the scene as white people do, “with socially fortified . . . iden-tities that are certain of who they are” and whose “psychic integrity” is not at risk (Yancy 2012, 131). As a result, even though explicit Jim Crow lawshave long been removed from the books in the United States, the Ameri-can world is not a smooth space of easy passage for black people in theway that it generally is for white people. The world presents obstacles toblack people at just about every turn.Even though the obstacles are not physical, their effects can be. Kim Anderson, an African American lawyer, captures this point well as sheexplains her experience being tailed: So nobody, when I walk in a store, nobody says, “Oh, that’s Kim Anderson, African-American, female lawyer, went to Columbia,” they just see a blackwoman. I was in a store once, just walking around thinking I was going tobuy a pair of jeans. This clerk’s following me around. So I said, “Why are youfollowing me around? I’m not going to steal anything. Leave me alone. I’mnot going to take something.” When you’re confronted with racism, that covert racism, your stomach just gets so tight. You can feel it almost moving through your body; almost you can feel it going into your bloodstream.(Quoted in California Newsreel 2008, 7) We should understand Anderson’s last point literally. When she describes white racism coursing through the veins and tissues of her body, she is right. It is highly likely that the emotional tension she felt in the store was simultaneously a physiological event in which cortisol and other stress-related hormones elevated her heart rate and stimulated the sym-pathetic branch of her ANS (Boyles 2010). The “outside” of the social world cannot be sharply divided from the “inside” her body. The racism “outside” Anderson’s body simultaneously was “inside,” altering her heart brain (for the worse in this case).