Black Silence: An American Prescription

Racism in America is not confined to observable acts of hatred or cruelty. Racism compounds in the body with silence and erasure. The body remembers what society tries to forget---its own brutality.

America was built on Black brutality. Coates reflects on this in his book, Between the World and Me, the blood, the “nails driven through tongue and ears pruned away…” (Coates 104). Life in Black America is still traumatizing and inescapable. "Not being violent enough” or “being too violent” could cost them their body, they “could not get out" (Coates 28).

This exposure to trauma and constant state of vigilance reshapes the nervous system under the skin. Coates remembers how his “face would tighten…eyes would dart from corner to corner…arms loose, limber, and ready.” He knew that all of this anxiety to survive “contributed to the fast breakdown” of the black body (Coates 90). The body is the site of trauma’s residue. What Coates is describing is a survival state of freeze—a horror—where the body prepares for inescapable plunder. These physiological consequences are not theoretical; they are visceral and measurable.

Hypertension and autoimmune diseases disproportionately affect Black communities (Williamson, Streed, Capilupi et al.). “When so-called biomarkers such as blood pressure, stress hormones, blood sugar indicators, inflammatory proteins, and lipids were measured, they were significantly higher in Blacks than in whites…In both races poor people scored higher than their economically advantaged counterparts, but non-poor Blacks had a greater probability of high scores than poor whites” (Maté and Maté 319). Bessel Van der Kolk M.D., a renowned trauma psychiatrist and professor, discovered fMRI scans that show deactivation in Broca’s Area, a speech center in the brain, during trauma flashbacks. He calls this "speechless horror," a freeze response that shuts down voice, agency, and memory (Van Der Kolk 43). This is evidence that people may struggle communicating the horrors they’ve experienced.

Renowned physician Gabor Maté M.D. describes how repeated stress shortens telomeres (biological markers of aging), especially in those experiencing racism. Racism literally shortens lifespans and continued emotional suppression accelerates that biological aging (Maté and Maté  65). This fact of suppression should emphasize the danger of erasing history and the need for critical analysis of systemic racism–of believing the survivors of racism.

Chronic vigilance rewires the brain and makes healing almost impossible without acknowledging the conditions that created the trauma in the first place. A reckoning with one's own body is required. Coates didn’t write a study, present a powerpoint, and provide cold evidence. He reflected on his visceral experience as a person having Black body in America. He takes back his body, and celebrates the survivors around him. Coates remembers the joy of Howard University and the Black diaspora, a moment “beyond the Dream” (Coates 147-149). In the face of trauma, storytelling becomes an act of resistance—a way for the body, community, and memory to speak back. This glorious reclaiming of the body, in the brain’s struggle to speak, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the joyful embodiment at Howard University’s Homecoming: “That was a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the Dream…(Coates 147-149). Coates names art and music—Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Mobb Deep—that are the embodied memory and survival of Black Americans (Coates, 149). When history is erased, the embodied story becomes its survival. Movement, melody, and memoir preserve what policy removes. The body will resist erasure and silencing, it will fight to be heard and known–and this reckoning with one's own body is a glorious achievement. To articulate the horrors is to “know the conditions that shape…existence” (Cabanas and Illouz 183). To speak truthfully about one’s body, to restore the speech center of the brain, to name the violence it has survived, is to reclaim the body. Coates turns his journalism into healing, his memoir into resistance (Coates 12). Even when people try to forget, the body will remember—and so will the story, the song, and the sermon. It is how a people become a people, even when systems reduce them to myth. 

 There is a history of silencing the Black Americans that do ask for help. Some are swiftly prescribed psychiatric medication to numb the pain. Medications, including antipsychotics like Risperdal are often prescribed to Black youth with the brain disease model in mind, instead of the focus being on environmental or social change. Van Der Kolk reflects on this:

After conducting numerous studies of medications for PTSD, I have come to realize that psychiatric medications have a serious downside, as they may deflect attention from dealing with the underlying issues..Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable…These medications make children more manageable and less aggressive, but they also interfere with motivation, play, and curiosity, which are indispensable for maturing into a well-functioning and contributing member of society. Children who take them are also at risk of becoming morbidly obese and developing diabetes. Meanwhile, drug overdoses involving a combination of psychiatric and pain medications continue to rise. (Van Der Kolk 37-38)

Trauma symptoms may be misdiagnosed as a mental disorder, rather than understood as a natural human response to oppression. This silencing compounds the trauma, proving that even our esteemed American medical systems can perpetuate the very damage they claim to treat. 

The body remembers what society tries to forget—and America is trying to forget. The horrors of children's psychiatric treatment is reflected in a quote by Nelson Mandela, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children” (Mandela 1:02) America is losing its soul. Professors Cabanas and Illouz in their book Manufacturing Happy Citizens reveal that “Positive psychology can be used as a political tool to erase social malaise and replace it with forced optimism” (Cabanas and Illouz 182). An Executive Order made on April 3rd 2025, illustrates how America is manufacturing happy citizens through positive psychology and erasing negative history. It seeks to "restore truth and sanity to American history…[by focusing on]...the remarkable achievements of the United States" while explicitly removing the history of racial violence, recasting the American narrative into one of innocence and triumph (Trump, Executive Order 14253). This brutality has shaped itself into something that is carved into the Black body and hides under the surface of Black skin. Racism often hides in silence, creating systemic violence.

Racism, and its forgetting, is not a mistake, but an act of violence on the Black body. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, "there exists... an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value" (Coates 8). Silence is not neutral. Suppression—of emotion, of history, of acknowledgment—is a form of violence that corrodes the body over time, shortening life spans, stopping the heart (Maté and Maté  65, Williamson, Streed, Capilupi et al.).

Racism survives through the erasure of harm from history. This erasure allows the Dream to persist, wrapped in the illusion of white American innocence and shaped into national pride. The Dream, as Coates describes, is peace and prosperity built on the backs of the oppressed (Coates 11). Its preservation requires forgetting, erasing Black history, branding the nation as innocent, and easing the conscience of white Americans. “The happiness industry... blurs and confuses our very capacity to know the conditions that shape our existence” (Cabanas and Illouz 183). The narrative of "personal responsibility" replaces systemic accountability, and the Black bodies continue to break. This erasure of history, effective marketing, and pressured silence allows for a covert, banal, and ongoing violence toward Black Americans.

The body is evidence of its history. Whether Black American history should be shared in museums and in schools, is not a casual question of censorship, but an act of violence on the traumatized Black body. Ms Lauryn Hill sums this up in her own words, “See, it don't change the truth, And your hurt feeling’s no excuse, To keep me in this box. Psychological locks, Repressin' true expression, Cementin' this repression, Promotin' mass deception So that no one can be healed.” No one can be healed in silence, in numbness and disconnection. Truth and attunement can heal the body and soul. Waking up from the American Dream begins with recording history correctly, and listening to the body, under the skin, with all its pain and history.

  
  

Capilupi, Michael J, et al. “Vagus Nerve Stimulation and the Cardiovascular System.” PubMed Central, U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine, 10 Feb. 2020, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6996447/. 

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015.

Hill, Ms Lauryn. “I Get Out.” MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, Sony Music Entertainment, 2002. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4iwmTjkAokDyP9S51mpzQy?si=1802874113b54dbd

Maté, Gabor, and Daniel Maté. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Penguin Random House, 2022. 

Nelson, Mandela. “Nelson Mandela Children's Fund Documentary” YouTube, uploaded by Teneighty, 25 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrKCilEhC0&feature=youtu.be.

Streed, Joel. “Mayo Clinic Minute: Hypertension and Cardiovascular Disease in the Black Community - Mayo Clinic News Network.” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 28 Feb. 2025, newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-minute-hypertension-and-cardiovascular-disease-in-the-black-community. 

Sharot, Tali. The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About the Power to Change Others. Macmillan Publishing Group, 2017.

United States, Executive Office of the President [Donald J. Trump]. Executive Order 14253: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. 27 March 2025. Federal Register, vol. 90, no. 63, pp. 14563-14565, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-04-03/pdf/2025-05838.pdf.

Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps The Score. Penguin Random House, 2014.

Williamson, Laura. “The Link between Structural Racism, High Blood Pressure and Black People’s Health.” www.Heart.Org, American Heart Association, 15 Apr. 2021, www.heart.org/en/news/2021/04/15/the-link-between-structural-racism-high-blood-pressure-and-black-peoples-health.