University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Black women’s mental health is impacted by the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America

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Black women’s mental health is impacted by the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America

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Black Women ’s Mental Health Is Impacted by the Unjust Killing of Their Unarmed Black
Relatives in America
By
Leslyn McBean-Clairborne

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education

December 2022

© Copyright by Leslyn McBean-Clairborne 2022
All Rights Reserved

The Committee for Leslyn McBean-Clairborne certifies the approval of this Dissertation

Daihnia Dunkley
Briana Hinga
Cathy Sloane Krop, Committee Chair

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2022
iv
Abstract
Say their names: Venida Browder and Erica Garner, two Black women who fought relentlessly
for justice for their relatives who were unarmed and faced fatal injustices. Venida and Erica
suffered trauma from the deaths of their loved ones, Kalief Browder and Eric Garner, then dealt
with multiple layers of victimization and continued trauma as they set aside their grief to seek
justice in a system stacked against them. The psychological impact on them materialized
physical ailments that caused both to die prematurely. This qualitative research examined the
problem of the impact on Black women’s mental health of the unjust killing of their unarmed
Black relatives. Stories such as Venida’s and Erica’s are indicative of the invisible and somewhat
unconscious victimization of Black women. Through interviews, the study’s participants shared
their stories of trying to cope with the killings of their unarmed Black relatives, their perceived
strength to cope, and the immediate and long-term effects they suffered, particularly PTSD.
Critical race theory and intersectionality provided the foundation to explore and understand
Black women’s racialized and gender-oppressive experiences related to these killings. Their
circumstances began with the historical denial of Black humanity, society-sanctioned racist
policies and laws, practices that criminalize Black people, and the lack of justice. Suggested
recommendations informed by the study’s findings and participants’ expressed needs center the
investment in community care. They include reimagined public safety, increased numbers of
qualified Black counselors and therapists, and addressing the Black genocide through strategic
healing plans. All aspects of this study were constructed to address individual and systemic
inequities that, when corrected or stopped, can reduce the unjust killings of unarmed Black
people, consequently reducing the mental health impact on Black women. Those reductions will
take all stakeholders’ collective efficacy and funding.
v
Dedication
To all the Black people in these United States. Let us tell our stories until they are heard. Let us
continue to demand equity because it is our universally given right. And let us do this with
power, integrity, and soul support for each other. As the late Dr. James E. Turner, Scholar-
Activist and Founder of Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University said, let us
“be of the race and for the race.”
To my sons Julius and Kelsey. You were the impetus behind me pursuing this specific research.
As young Black men in America, I felt that your lives were numbered. Each time I see another
unarmed Black male killed, my heart stops because I know it could just as easily be one of you.
You have weathered your share of run-ins with the law and have persevered. I hold faith that you
will use your experiences to better your own lives and the lives of other young Black people.
To my husband J.R. and my daughter Indira, I could not have done this without you. Your
unconditional love and support throughout this journey kept me going. I know you missed me
when I was locked away in the upgeon writing. I truly value the sacrifices you made, the
occasional checking in just to give me a hug, and of course to bring me food. Indira, I hope I
made you proud. I owe you a 16th birthday do-over. J.R., cheers to true Black Love! I promise to
be back in full force for football and basketball seasons. Oh, and a vacation.
To my mother Lucille McBean. You may not be physically here, but I feel your presence every
day pushing me. I hear your gentle voice daily encouraging me to be everything and anything
that I want to be. You have been my rock and my forever Guardian Angel. As I crossed the
graduation stage, I danced because that is what you would have done with me. This one’s for
you, Mom! Love you all!
vi
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the village that surrounded me and pulled me along this journey to
achieve my doctorate. First, thanks to my dissertation committee. To my Chair, Dr. Krop, thank
you for your patience, guidance, and understanding, for always making me feel valued even
when I doubted myself and that my research was needed. I appreciated your nudging without
adding to my feeling overwhelmed. Dr. Hinga and Dr. Dunkley, thank you for serving on my
committee and for sharing your wisdom and expertise in my research topic. You opened my eyes
to other relevant areas that made my work so much richer.
Thanks for your steadfast support Cohort 16 Saturday Breakfast Club Study Group. Each
time I wanted to quit, you talked me out of it and assured me that we will get through it together.
Joanna Seltzer, you saw me and helped me breathe. Thank you. SBCSG and Friends for Life!
Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell, I cannot thank you enough for your guidance and clarity
when I was confused, your support in sharing research literature, and your encouragement. Tre
Bell of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and Amos Malone, my brothers, and Dr. Charlise Hogue-
Vincent, my sister, I owe you all a debt of gratitude for your help connecting with study
participants. Kat Golaub, you showed up for me in the most meaningful way to help open doors
for me. I thank you for that as well as your spontaneous, genuine, check-ins.
To my GIAC family, mere words cannot express the profound thanks and love I have for
all of you. Thanks for holding me and the agency down when I had to be away. Thanks for being
proud of me and celebrating my/our accomplishment. Rahmel and Aleshia, special thanks for
your graphics help. You all are the best coworkers hands down.
To Chase, Honora, Nettie, Erma, Tish, Wilbe, and others who shared stories with me, I
thank you for your bravery, openness and trust. I wish you peace and healing for your hearts.
vii
Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... vi
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. ix
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. x
Chapter One: Introduction to the Problem of Practice.................................................................... 1
Context and Background of the Problem .............................................................................2
Field of Study .......................................................................................................................5
Purpose of the Study and Research Questions .....................................................................5
Importance of the Study .......................................................................................................6
Overview of Theoretical Framework and Methodology .....................................................7
Definitions............................................................................................................................9
Organization of the Dissertation ........................................................................................11
Chapter Two: Review of the Literature ........................................................................................ 13
Othering Black People’s Humanity ...................................................................................14
Disproportionate and Unjust Killing of Unarmed Black People .......................................23
Race-Based Trauma/PTSD ................................................................................................36
Theoretical Framework ......................................................................................................48
Conceptual Framework ......................................................................................................53
Summary of Review ..........................................................................................................55
Chapter Three: Methodology ........................................................................................................ 57
Research Questions ............................................................................................................57
Overview of Design ...........................................................................................................58
Research Setting.................................................................................................................58
viii
Researcher ..........................................................................................................................59
Data Sources ......................................................................................................................62
Data Analysis .....................................................................................................................67
Credibility and Trustworthiness .........................................................................................67
Ethics..................................................................................................................................69
Limitations and Delimitations ............................................................................................70
Chapter Four: Results and Findings .............................................................................................. 72
Participants .........................................................................................................................73
Data Analysis .....................................................................................................................75
Results For Research Questions.........................................................................................80
Summary of Results and Findings ...................................................................................117
Chapter Five: Recommendations ................................................................................................ 120
Discussion of Findings .....................................................................................................121
Recommendations for Practice ........................................................................................147
Limitations of the Study...................................................................................................163
Recommendations for Future Research ...........................................................................164
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................164
References ................................................................................................................................... 168
Appendix A: Interview Protocol ................................................................................................. 190
Participants .......................................................................................................................190
Introduction to the Interview ...........................................................................................190
Conclusion to the Interview .............................................................................................194
Appendix B: Recruitment Email ................................................................................................. 195

ix
List of Tables
Table 1: Demographic Characteristics of Interview Participants 74
Table 2: Circumstances Surrounding Relatives’ Deaths 80
Table 3: Summary of Nettie’s and Honora’s Account of Psychophysiological Impact 83
Table 4: Adjudication Status of Participant Cases 103
Table 5: Internalized Trauma Versus Outward Strength: Highlights of Participants’ Responses to
Q11 116
Table 6: Summary of Key Findings: Unjust Killings Impact Black Women’s Mental Health 118
Table 7: Summary: Coping Strategies and Participants’ Use 146
Table 8: Summary: RQs, Key Findings, and Recommendations 149
Table A1: Interview Protocol 191

x
List of Figures
Figure 1: Conceptual Framework 55
Figure 2: Color Codes and Corresponding Interview Questions 77
Figure 3: Coded Emergent Themes 78
Figure 4: Codebook: Relationship Between Codes, Major Themes, Key Findings and
Subfindings 79
Figure 5: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs 156

1

Chapter One: Introduction to the Problem of Practice
This research addressed the problem of the impact on Black women’s mental health of
the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America. According to the U.S. Bureau of
Justice Statistics (2011), Black males, who make up 12% of the male population, represented
27.8% per 100,000 homicide victims between 1980 and 2008, which was six times greater than
White males at 4.5% per 100,000 homicide victims during the same timeframe. In a more recent
report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2017) reported that in 2015, the
homicide rate of the total population was 5.7 per 100,000. However, it was 20.9 for Black
people. Although this number decreased since 2008, in 2015, it was still about three times greater
than the national average, and it increased to eight times greater than among White people, who
were at 2.6 per 100,000.
The discrepancy between homicide deaths by police for Black and White people is also
high (Lowery, 2016). Between 1999 and 2015, rates of deaths from homicide were highest for
Black people and lowest for non-Hispanic Whites (CDC, 2017). Specifically, unarmed Black
males face a disproportionate rate of being killed by police at about four times the rate of both
White and Latino males, accounting for 36% of unarmed deaths (Pratt-Harris et al., 2016).
The fate of Black women due to these unjust killings is similar. Since 2015, Black
women, who are 13% of the female population, account for 20% of the women shot and killed
(Washington Post, n.d.). Of the unarmed women shot and killed by police between 2015 to 2022,
21% were Black (Washington Post, n.d.). These actions are rooted in perpetual systemic racism,
which has rendered Black people, especially Black males, anything but human (Aymer, 2016).
According to King (1981), African slaves, from whom most Black people in America descend,
were inherently property and rightless.
2

The evidence shows that throughout U.S. history, Black people have been dehumanized,
criminalized, and made to be other, a racist practice, which makes it easy or legal to kill them
(Aymer, 2016). Coupled with the inherited trauma from slavery and the Jim Crow era, these
killings increased the damage to Black Americans’ mental health (Bor et al., 2018). Relevant to
this study, Black women who cope with and fight for justice in the aftermath of these killings are
dying slowly from racial trauma, loss, and pain (Smith, 2018). This research sought to inform
sustainable changes to policies and practices to address the secondary layers of race-based post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mental health trauma that Black women experience in the
context of the killing of their unarmed Black relatives.
Context and Background of the Problem
To understand the reach of this problem, it is imperative to understand the history of the
diminishing/othering of Black humanity dating to the beginning of slavery in America (Morris,
1996) and the legacy of Black racial criminalization since the 1890s in the post-slavery era
(Muhammad, 2010). Constitutions and laws were written and passed to justify and continue the
institution of chattel slavery, which meant that Black slaves were property that could be moved
and treated as owners pleased, including killing them (DeGruy, 2005). Black Africans were torn
from their home countries, brought to the United States, bought, sold, and traded for goods as the
property of their masters (Wallenfeldt, 2010). The laws of slavery were based entirely on the
racial superiority of Whites and inferiority of Blacks that rendered Black Africans natural slaves
because of their skin color (Morris, 1996).
The White supremacy movement explicitly demonstrates the othering of Black people’s
humanity from the post-slavery Jim Crow period to the present, with over-policing,
discriminatory criminal justice punishments, and “body-parts-collecting lynch mobs”
3

(Muhammad, 2010, p. 4). From 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 to George Floyd and Breonna
Taylor in 2020 (Baker, 2006; Kuhn, 2020; Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, 2020), among
others, all were unarmed and killed unjustly because of racist practices (Smiley & Fakunle,
2016). The point of these examples is that the oppressive episodes that followed American
slavery and continue today through the unjust killings of unarmed Black people cause trauma
(Danieli, 1998).
The treatment of Black people as objects goes beyond their sale to dismissing their
existence and emotional capacities (DeGruy, 2005). White businessman F. C. Macy testified
about witnessing slave boys forced to take off their clothes and fight for the amusement of their
masters: “They would fight until both got to crying” (Weld, 1839/2013, p. 107). In a 2020 forum
hosted by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw on state violence and public silence against Black women and
girls, Sharon Cooper, whose sister Sandra Bland died in police custody following a traffic stop,
stated that Black women and girls are rendered immediately invisible in situations such as her
sister’s. She said they are historically perceived as objects instead of human beings (African
American Policy Forum, 2020). When officers show up, she said, “they don’t see us, or their
mothers, their sisters or their friends; they see an object that is perceptively, by society standards,
is out of control that needs to be placed under control” (African American Policy Forum, 2020,
41:48).
Lynching is another tool of White supremacy used to other Black people and keep them
under control. Juxtapose the 1918 lynching of an unarmed pregnant Black woman, Mary Turner
(Danieli, 1998; DeGruy, 2005), with the 2019 shooting death of another unarmed Black woman,
Pamela Turner, who claimed that she was pregnant (NewsOne Staff, 2021). This kind of
victimization and diminishing of Black humanity supports othering, as Black people are
4

criminalized in what Alexander (2010) and Wilkerson (2020) described as America’s caste
system.
News media also play a role in othering Black people through biased reporting that
presents an image of Black males in particular as deviant (Butler, 2017; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016).
For example, during the April 2015 Baltimore uprising, media reports described Black male
rioters as thugs, but after the University of Kentucky’s basketball team lost the national
championship a month later, media reports described White rioters as fans (Pratt-Harris et al.,
2016). On June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, White male Dylann Roof walked into a
historically Black church and shot and killed nine Black worshippers. The media described him
as the perpetrator of a hate crime and a domestic terrorist, not a thug or criminal (Pratt-Harris et
al., 2016).
Additionally, state-sanctioned racial-profiling strategies like stop and frisk and driving
while Black (DWB) increased criminalization and death for Black people (Alexander, 2010;
Butler, 2017). James Byrd in Jasper, Texas (Rushdy, 2012), Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin,
Stephon Clark, Amadou Diallo (Alexander, 2010; Butler, 2017), Yvette Smith, Atatiana
Jefferson, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, among many
others, were unarmed Black people who were unjustly shot and killed by police, citizen
vigilantes, or White supremacists (Washington Post, n.d.; NewsOne Staff, 2020).
These unjust killings that occur along the criminal justice system’s spectrum, from police
to prison, put a too-heavy weight on Black women (Smith, 2018). They become sick, and several
die in the weeks and months following their relative’s killing (Smith, 2016). This circumstance
was the case with Erica Garner, who spent months grieving the killing of her father, Eric Garner,
and simultaneously fighting for justice for him. Erica, aged 27, died 2 and a half years after her
5

father’s death (Smith, 2018). Erica stated, “I’m struggling with my health right now. … The
system beats you down” (Smith, 2018, p. 3).
Field of Study
While Black men die disproportionately from police and vigilante physical violence,
Black women die slowly from these killings’ enduring effects (Smith, 2016). These killings are
traumatic to Black women, such as Diamond Reynolds and her young daughter, who were in the
car when police killed Reynolds’s fiancé Philando Castile, an experience that made them victims
as well (Smith, 2016). Trauma occurs when a sudden and unpredictable event occurs within a
definitive period that threatens an individual’s life or personal integrity, creating feelings of fear
or hopelessness and diminishing their psychological functioning (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017;
Danieli, 1998). Such psychological trauma can result in PTSD triggered by thoughts, similar
events, distrust, memories, and other factors (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017).
Race-based trauma/PTSD, the central field of this research, is much more complex. This
type of trauma is described as the psychological impact of oppression and intimidation based on
race that conjures up images and feelings of fear, pain, damage, and hopelessness over
generations (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Danieli, 1998). It is cumulative, collective trauma
grounded in racism that results in intergenerational psychological distress, motivated by one
group’s need to impose their sense of power over another group that is afforded less power in the
social structure (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017). This historical context must be considered to
accurately assess Black women’s race-based trauma/PTSD (Harrell, 2000).
Purpose of the Study and Research Questions
Witnessing or experiencing violence directly is “one of the most common and
emotionally disruptive means of trauma” (Snyder, 2020, p. 58). Specific to this study, the Say
6

Her Name Project of the African American Policy Forum (2020) confirmed that women are at
the forefront of fighting for justice for their killed relatives and policy changes. Their close
exposure to this community violence victimizes them as they relive the hurt and trauma with
each new death, court appearance, interview, or media story (Snyder, 2020). Therefore, the
purpose of this study was to understand how Black women experience the secondary layers of
race-based trauma/PTSD in the context of the killing of their unarmed relatives to inform
sustainable policies and practices to address their needs.
This study explored the impact of the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives on Black
women’s mental health in America. The following research questions focused and guided the
research to center these women’s experiences:
1. How do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an unarmed Black
relative understand the mental health impact of that event?
2. To what extent do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an
unarmed Black relative view subsequent responses from the law as helpful or harmful
to their mental health?
3. How do Black women experience the societal myth about Black women’s resilience
in the context of their ability to deal with the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives?
Importance of the Study
Black women are particularly vulnerable to racism-related trauma because of the
intersection of their subordinate identities of gender and race and other social factors (Pieterse et
al., 2013). Black women are also most likely to internalize their emotions to deal with the racism
associated with these killings (Pieterse et al., 2013) because the myth of being unshakable
dictates that Black girls do not cry. Black women are not allowed to be vulnerable or needy
7

(Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). They are seen as tough, in charge, and able to withstand pain
and defend themselves against tragic incidents while navigating a social system not meant to
protect them (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003; Wade, 2020). These stereotypes render Black
women and their struggles invisible (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). Black women’s identities
and lived experiences provide them with a reservoir of wisdom, yet their voices are silenced,
ignored, or denied (Winters, 2020). Thus, Black women lack the social support to cope with the
trauma of killings, which has historically been and remains dangerous to their health and well-
being (Smith, 2018).
By understanding the manifestations of this impact, policymakers can begin to reimagine
practices toward national change to eliminate the root of the problem. In addition, this
understanding could push the advancement of culturally appropriate services and service
providers to address these issues and help Black women improve their psychological fortitude
(Wilkerson, 2020). Finally, there is a dearth of empirical literature specifically addressing Black
women’s invisibility or experience as victims of the fallout of law enforcement and vigilante
violence, which is killing them (Smith, 2016). There is a new amplification of police killings of
Black people, yet it is still difficult to find information about most of the unarmed Black women
killed or the mothers, sisters, and other Black women affected by their relatives’ deaths (Jones &
Shorter-Gooden, 2003). This study is important to help fill this gap in the research.
Overview of Theoretical Framework and Methodology
The context that overlays this study is Black victimization, which is rooted in race and
racism and the continuous fight for social justice. Additionally, this study focused on the
experience of Black women in coping with the layers of Black victimization. To that extent, two
theories provided the framework for researching the problem: critical race theory (CRT) and
8

intersectionality. Critical race theory presents that racism is endemic to American life, a normal
order of things in America, identifying the systemic and implicit ways in which anti-Blackness,
operates in America (Crenshaw et al., 1995). The theory is societal/systemic, not individual, and
built on five tenets: the centrality of race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms
of subordination, the challenge of dominant ideology, the commitment to social justice, the
centrality of experiential knowledge, and the transdisciplinary perspective (Solórzano & Yosso,
2002). The literature about CRT helps to center the lived reality of Black women, who are often
the invisible victims of race-based violence against their Black relatives (Jones & Shorter-
Gooden, 2003), thus amplifying and helping to understand the problem.
Intersectionality is a framework that accounts for people’s overlapping identities and
experiences to conceptualize and understand the complexity of discriminations and prejudices
they face. These identities do not exist independently of each other, and they inform each other
(Crenshaw, 1989). Single-identity/issue analysis puts Black women at a distinct disadvantage
compared to White women and Black men. The intersectionality of their race and gender means
that they can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar and different to White
women and Black men (Crenshaw, 1989). In relation to this study, using this theory shows that
Black women are multidimensional, and because of their intersected subordinate identities as
Black and female, the impact of the killing of their unarmed Black relatives can affect them in
various ways, including long-lasting trauma, PTSD, and invisibility, all in a culture of silence
(Barlow, 2018; Smith, 2018).
This qualitative study used a narrative inquiry method and an analytical approach. This
approach supported participants’ exploring their experiences, feelings, and reactions associated
with the killings of their unarmed Black relatives. Qualitative research seeks to understand how
9

participants interpret their experiences, what meaning they attribute to those experiences, and
how they make sense of their lives and interactions within a specific context (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016). This aim aligns well with understanding the nuances of trauma, which Herman (2015)
described as an individual’s understanding of their feelings, actions, and motives in response to a
particular issue within a specific social setting. The research design utilizes multiple data sources
to inform the study (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). This study’s data sources were personal
interviews of a small, purposefully chosen, and knowledgeable group of participants; video
interviews they gave about the killings; and documents they provided.
Definitions
This study includes key concepts and terminologies common to the experiences of Black
people in America who deal with racism’s injustices daily. These concepts are central to
understanding the participants’ interpretations of the killing of their unarmed relatives, the
impact on them, and their coping strategies. Defining these key concepts offers clarity and
consistency in how they are presented in the study.
Black people: all people descended from indigenous Sub-Saharan Africans or first- and
second-generation immigrants living in America whom the dominant culture racially positions as
Black (Taylor, 2016).
Black relatives: any Black person in a close-knit consensual or familial relationship of
family, friends, or partners (Rothbart, 2018).
Historic myth of Black women’s strength: refers to Black women being seen as
unflappable, able to shake and bend but never break, having exceptional strength to withstand
pain and move on from it while simultaneously nurturing and protecting everyone else from it
(Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003).
10

Intersectionality: the overlapping of subordinate identities that lead to people often being
disadvantaged, oppressed, and discriminated against in multiple ways (Crenshaw, 1989). For this
study, these identities are Black, woman, and mother.
Invisible victimization of Black women: refers to Black women being left to cope with the
pain and continued injustices associated with the killing of their Black relatives. These women
are not as visible, known, or supported as those who died. They are often victimized by being
ignored, silenced, or passed over, and they suffer double jeopardy due to the deaths and the
ensuing discriminatory/dismissive treatment they receive (Rosette & Livingston, 2012).
Othering of Black people: viewing or treating Black people as less than human, objects,
or property, or ascribing Black people a negative characteristic that leads to discriminatory
treatment and implicit bias, unjust punishment, and even death (Aymer, 2016).
Police/state violence against Black people: refers to the fact that Black people are
significantly more likely than White people to be shot and killed by the police; to be stopped and
searched by the police while walking, driving, or standing; to be treated in a violent and
humiliating manner; and to be detained for long periods when the police stop them. The phrase
also refers to the fact that Black neighborhoods are targeted for special attention and over-
policing and that Black people are arrested, convicted, and imprisoned at rates greatly surpassing
those of Whites who engage in similar criminal and noncriminal behaviors (Downey & Mark,
2021).
Post-traumatic slave syndrome: refers to multigenerational trauma from years of slavery,
continued oppression, inaccessibility to social benefits available to others, and persistent inequity
and dehumanization (DeGruy, 2005).
11

Systemic racism: collective practices, mechanisms, and behaviors that reproduce and
maintain racial domination of one group over another through social, political, economic,
cultural, and even psychological denial of access to resources, opportunities, and rewards
(Bonilla-Silva, 2021).
Race-based PTSD/mental health trauma: a conditioned emotional response of severe
stress, anxiety, fear, and pain that arises when a person experiences loss or injury because of a
racism-related incident or is exposed to an incident that triggers memories and fear of historic
and continuing abuse and oppression (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Danieli, 1998).
Unarmed Black people: Black people who do not show or brandish a weapon in a
menacing/threatening manner, hold any weapon known to be harmful, or directly display
behavior that is threatening to their assailants but who are assumed to be dangerous based on
biased, racist practices and policies (Darden & Godsay, 2018).
Unjust killing: the death of a Black person resulting from lethal force, including firearms
and the chokehold, used to control the situation or stop the actions of that person, whom the
assailants criminalize although they pose no existential threat to the assailants, are non-
confrontational, or are complying with police orders (Butler, 2017).
Organization of the Dissertation
This study is organized into five chapters. Chapter One introduces the problem examined,
the area of interest or field, the purpose and significance of conducting the research, definitions
of key concepts and terms used throughout the study, the theoretical lens through which the
study was framed, and the research questions that the study sought to answer with the
methodology for getting the answers. Chapter Two will review literature that is relevant to the
problem and research questions and introduce the conceptual framework used to organize ideas
12

and identify the logical connections of the various concepts to frame the research of the
experiences of Black women relating to the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives. Chapter
Three will discuss the study’s overall design, methodology, protocols, data collection
instruments, procedures and analysis, participants’ demographics and recruitment, and the ethical
considerations that inform the study. Chapter Four will include a discussion of the study’s
research questions and present the research findings in the context of the theoretical frameworks.
Finally, Chapter Five will present a summary of the findings with related limitations, blind spots,
conclusions based on the findings, and recommendations.

13

Chapter Two: Review of the Literature
This chapter presents a review of the literature related to the mental-health trauma Black
women experience as the invisible victims of race-based violence against their unarmed Black
relatives. This review covers literature under three topic areas that emerged from the review and
are relevant to understanding the complexity of the problem. The literature is explored through
the lens of historical and contemporary contexts, individual and intergenerational impact, and
publicly sanctioned laws, policies, and myths under the large umbrella of systemic racism. These
broad topic areas are the othering of the humanity of Black people, particularly Black males,
throughout the history of the United States; the disproportionate and unjust killing of unarmed
Black people; and race-based trauma/PTSD.
The following interlaced questions shaped this review. They explore the continual effect
of systemic racism on Black women’s mental health, their strength to cope, and a spectrum of
coping strategies that are not always helpful.
• Where and how did the diminishing of Black people’s humanity begin?
• How does that behavior manifest today?
• What is the role of racist policies and practices in perpetuating the unjust killing of
Black people in America?
Overall, the central focus of this review is the perpetual and invisible chokehold that Black
women suffer related to these killings and the lack of justice for the killings.
The purpose of this chapter is to review and synthesize the literature on how Black
women experience the killings of their unarmed Black relatives and their subsequent fight for
justice or support. In large part, it covers how law enforcement and vigilante actions result in the
unjust killing of unarmed Black men, but it does not negate the rising number of Black women
14

who suffer similar fates. The review speaks to the invisible and somewhat unconscious
victimization of Black women as they try to cope with these killings and the immediate and long-
term effects, particularly PTSD. It reviews information and supports the importance of
conducting this research to add to the knowledge base regarding this topic.
Othering Black People’s Humanity
Aymer (2016) described the othering of Black people as viewing or treating Black people
as less than human, objects, or property. This view ascribes negative characteristics to Black
people that lead to discriminatory treatment, implicit bias, unjust punishment, or even death.
Southcott and Theodore (2020) outlined a precise understanding of othering in this way:
“Othering” suggests not just difference that should be acknowledged but also immorality
that should be repudiated: asymmetrical power, systemic inequalities, oppression, and
inequity. “Othering” implies “otherism,” a psychological, sociological, or institutional
position that, like racism, is only ever negative. To be otherist is to mark as inferior that
which is not inferior in order to oppress it. (p. 162)
Black people have been subjected to this treatment for centuries, justified by the constructs of
White supremacy and of race and racial oppression, which are the primary contributors to the
othering of the humanity of Black people, particularly Black males, in America (Pratt-Harris et
al., 2016).
History of Othering Black People
Slavery in the Americas had a racial basis (Morris, 1996). There was a clearly defined
understanding of White supremacy and Black inferiority, where every Black person brought to
America at that time was considered intellectually indigent and naturally a slave by an act of God
and the color of their skin (Bey, 2016; DeGruy, 2005; Morris, 1996). With complete disregard
15

for their human rights and dignity, early slave owners forced Black Africans from their homes
and brought them to the United States as slaves (Pratt-Harris et al., 2016; Wallenfeldt, 2010). In
this institution of slavery, they were victimized by racist and discriminatory practices that
included viewing them as property of the slave owners to do with as the owners pleased
(DeGruy, 2005). Finkelman (2012) outlined several laws of Virginia during the early slavery
days that demonstrate how Black people were othered. For example, Act X of June 1680 and Act
XVI of 1691 made it legal and gave authority to sheriffs to search and destroy by gun any slaves
who ran away from the master’s service, hid, and lurked in obscure places. These laws reduced
slaves to wild beasts to be hunted and killed (Finkelman, 2012).
Slaves were considered chattel property or real estate/freehold property (Harpham, 2018;
Morris, 1996). Chattel was the first level, but as the antislavery and abolitionist movements
grew, realty laws were ascribed to the ownership of slaves (Morris, 1996). From as early as
1705, Virginia applied the rules of real property law to slaves, which also occurred in many of
the Southern slave states (Harpham, 2018; Morris, 1996). As chattel property, slaves were
attached to the master as his personal belongings. The master had exclusive rights to use and
abuse his chattels. As freehold/real estate property, slaves were attached to the land in the same
way as a barn or pasture (Harpham, 2018). In this case, the master had a right to use the slaves
and their descendants for labor on the estates (Morris, 1996). Any transfer or inheritance of the
estate included the transfer of the slaves; they also were annexed to the land (Morris, 1996).
Regardless of property status, owners possessed absolute authority over the slaves, and
the treatment of the slaves was no different (Harpham, 2018). Notably, between the censuses of
1790 and 1860, the slave population of the South expanded from some 650,000 to 3.8 million as
16

slave owners acquired more property (Wallenfeldt, 2010). “The slave was an object of property
rights, he or she was a ‘thing’” (Morris, 1996, p. 57).
Media ’s Role in Othering
There is a long legacy of Black people, particularly Black men, being perceived by the
media and dominant-group Americans as criminals, thugs, thieves, uneducated, menacing, sexual
deviants, and something to be feared and handled in inhumane ways to keep it in its place (Bey,
2016; Butler, 2017; Smiley & Fakunle, 2016; Tolliver et al., 2016). This type of unsubstantiated,
prejudiced projection or othering gave rise to a modern construct, Blackophobia (Aymer, 2016;
Yousman, 2003). This is a stereotypic assumption that an entire group is inclined to commit
crimes that serves to label them as such to generate alienation of that group, which, in this case,
is Black people (Aymer, 2016; Yousman, 2003). Alexander (2010) wrote that in America,
criminals are the one social group people have permission to hate. The adage of treating someone
like a criminal essentially means treating them as less than human, like a shameful creature
(Alexander, 2010; Bey, 2016).
Mass media strategically presents information with the right frequency, timeliness,
distortion of facts, provocative language, and selective information to paint an undeniable
deviant image of Black males (Butler, 2017; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016; Smiley & Fakunle, 2016).
Such media tactics relegate Black males to brutes or thugs (Smiley & Fakunle, 2016). Media
reports use communication filled with either micro-insults or micro-invalidations, both of which
demean Black people’s racial identity, diminish their humanity, and nullify their thoughts,
feelings, or lived experiences (Smiley & Fakunle, 2016; Sue et al., 2007). As previously
mentioned, media reports described people protesting after Freddie Gray’s death as thugs, yet
17

University of Kentucky supporters who engaged in similar behavior were described as fans
(Pratt-Harris et al., 2016).
In a Huffington Post article, Van Jones (2005) admonished the media for its repeated
biased reporting following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. These media reports described
Black people as criminals looting for food, but Whites were described as survivors and residents
finding food (Jones, 2005; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016;). Yahoo.com media featured two photos.
One showed two White people wading through water with food in their hands and was
captioned, “two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a
local grocery store.” The other picture showed a Black person doing the same thing, but the
caption read, “a young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in
New Orleans” (Armstrong, 2005, p. 1; Jones, 2005, para. 6-7). The term “looting” denotes
criminal action (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).
The media quickly develop and report a narrative that others the unarmed Black people
killed (Dixon, 2008; Smiley & Fakunle, 2016). Mostly, the reports focus on criminalizing the
victims (Butler, 2017; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016). For example, police and media portrayed
Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown as criminals following their wrongful murders
(Pratt-Harris et al., 2016). Trayvon Martin was wrongfully assumed to be a perpetrator of home
invasions in his neighborhood and then described as a marijuana user. Eric Garner was accused
of resisting arrest. Michael Brown was accused of shoplifting and bullying a store owner, then
resisting arrest (Butler, 2017; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016; Yancy & Jones, 2013). Subsequent media
reports emphasized the defense testimony of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, who shot
and killed Michael Brown and described Brown in non-human terms (Butler, 2017; Pratt-Harris
et al., 2016). The media replayed this testimony in which Officer Wilson stated, “The only way I
18

can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked” (Butler, 2017, p. 26). Officer
Wilson said that he felt like a child in the grip of Hulk Hogan and that Michael Brown’s eyes
revealed him to be demon-possessed with the intent to inflict harm (Pratt-Harris et al., 2016).
In contrast, on June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Roof, a White male,
walked into a church and shot and killed nine Black people who were there for Bible study
(Pratt-Harris et al., 2016). When Roof was arrested for the murders, the media described him not
as a thug or criminal but as the perpetrator of a hate crime and a domestic terrorist. The media
almost immediately focused on his mental health status and not the murders (Pratt-Harris et al.,
2016). Similarly, following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the
media blamed Adam Lanza’s killing of children and teachers on him being bullied, his untreated
mental illness, the lack of strict gun control laws, his turbulent upbringing, and his being a
troubled young man, nothing that labeled him a criminal (Fedschun, 2017; Ruskin, 2012;
Siemaszko, 2013).
Shooting victim Trayvon Martin had a different media presentation following his death.
The media deliberately tried to portray Trayvon Martin as not entirely innocent (Yancy & Jones,
2013). The media resurrected photos of him smiling with gold caps on his teeth. The narrative
became that Trayvon was once suspended from school for 10 days, was obsessed with body
tattoos, had low traces of marijuana in his system, and a search of his backpack at school once
yielded a small bag holding barely detectable traces of marijuana (Yancy & Jones, 2013). This
media portrayal of Trayvon released “the barrage of tropes, fears, and perceptions of monstrosity
that pre-exist in the White U.S.-American mind and turns a [17-year-old] young adult into a
dangerous creature” (Yancy & Jones, 2013, p. 110).
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Trayvon Martin is Black, and news media link Black people with criminality and
violence more often than Whites (Alexander, 2010; Dixon, 2008). On the other hand, the media
portrayed George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, as a concerned resident
doing his job as the neighborhood watchman and as fearful for his life (Yancy & Jones, 2013).
The media spent much time trying to decipher whether Zimmerman used a racial slur during the
incident as if to suggest that the only way to value Trayvon Martin as a human being and hold
Zimmerman responsible for killing him is if Zimmerman were a racist (Hodges, 2015). The
emotions of the perpetrators usually become central to the reporting when a person of color is
shot and killed, which was the case in Trayvon Martin’s death (Torres et al., 2017).
Between 1977 and 1999, the Philadelphia newspapers’ coverage of capital cases
frequently used phrases like “urban jungle” and “aping the suspect” in relation to Black
defendants, who were more likely to be executed when descriptions like “apelike” were
attributed to them (Butler, 2017). Per Butler (2017) and Goff et al. (20080, a large number of
Americans do not usually think of Blacks as human beings. They think of them as apes or
implicitly associate Blacks with apes (Butler, 2017; Goff et al., 2008). Notably, the Los Angeles
Police Department often referred to cases of Black-on-Black crime as “N.H.I.-No Human
Involved” (Butler, 2017, p. 26). Decisions to publicize descriptive information like the
Philadelphia newspapers did are systemic, organizational decisions because articles go through
layers of scrutiny before they are published (Smiley & Fakunle, 2016).
Personal and Intergenerational Impact of Othering on Women
“Mammy,” “Ho,” “Jezebel,” and “animalistic” were some of the words used to refer to
Black women in slavery (Bailey, 2021). It was a natural fit for slave women to be raped from a
young age because they were property, there to work and satisfy the sexual privileges of the
20

masters (DeGruy, 2005; Roberts, 1997/2017). Black women were perceived to be animal-like
and sexually promiscuous (DeGruy, 2005). The othering of Black women in slavery rested on
their use at any moment. When the slaveholders needed them to work as hard and endure
punishment as the slave men so that they could make a profit, the Black women slaves were
practically regarded as genderless (Davis, 1981). On the other hand, when their femininity could
be exploited as nurturers for White children, wet nurses for the masters’ babies, or for rape, they
were seen as women (Beal, 2008; Davis, 1981; Roberts, 1997/2017). In this regard, Black
women “were practically anomalies” (Davis, 1981, p. 5).
Motherhood, the most sacred and valued quality or spirit of any woman (Hilt, 2016), is
another state where Black women in slavery were othered. These women were considered
breeders, as opposed to mothers, and animals whose monetary value could be precisely
calculated by their ability to produce children (Bailey, 2021; Bennett, 2017; Davis, 1981).
Slaveholders in the southern states admitted in written letters that much attention was paid to the
breeding and growth of the slaves, similar to that of horses and mules (Bennett, 2017). One
South Carolina advertisement listing 50 slave women for sale referred to them as “prime” and
that “they were purchased for stock and breeding” (Bennett, 2017, p 84).
Black females in slavery would begin having children at age 13 and give birth to 13 or
more children (Bennett, 2017). A Lynchburg, Virginia, newspaper ran a story of a slave woman
who was 42 years old and had 41 children, which included several sets of twins (Bennett, 2017).
Such vivid imagery is important because slave mothers had no legal claim or rights to their
children. Their infant children were taken from them and sold like calves from cows (Davis,
1981). Courts in the southern slave states ruled that children could be sold away from their
mothers at any age because the young of slaves stand on the same footing as other animals
21

(Davis, 1981). This separation from their children was another way Black women’s humanity
was diminished, impacting their psychological wellness.
Black women have experienced this othering and degradation of Black humanity in a
multitude of ways across generations, including the impact on their mental health. Weld
(1839/2013) documented the testimony of F. C. Macy, a White businessman and witness to the
cruelty of slavery. Macy described the state of a Black woman who had her infant child taken
from her. He related that she was purchased in Charleston, separated from her husband, and
brought to Savannah. She delivered a baby, which was taken from her, “and in about [3] weeks
after this, she appeared to be deranged” (Weld, 1839/2013, p. 106). Slave mothers would do
whatever it took to protect their children from the cruelty of slavery, ranging from not trying to
escape to killing their infant children (Jacobs, 2001/1861; Roberts, 1997/2017). Slaveholders
used the children as hostages to prevent women from escaping, getting others who ran away to
return, or controlling others who were defiant in any way (Jacobs, 2001/1861; Roberts,
1997/2017; Wertheimer, 1977).
Moses Grandy (1843/2011), as a slave boy, recounted what happened to his mother as
she tried to resist the sale of one of his brothers:
My mother frantic with grief, resisted their taking her child away: she was beaten and
held down: she fainted and when she came to herself, her boy was gone. She made much
outcry, for which the master tied her up to a peach tree in the yard and flogged her.
(p. 10)
Such public flogging was a way to deter other slave mothers from resisting or hiding their
children to protect them from being sold (Jacobs, 2001/1861; Roberts, 1997/2017).
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Other oppressive incidents of othering have progressed through generations in slightly
morphed forms and have impacted Black women, mostly as microagressions and
microinvalidations (Brown, 2018; Sue et al., 2007) born from the intersectional risks of race,
class, and gender (Romano & Ragland, 2018). For instance, mass media referred to tennis
superstar Serena Williams’s body in animal-like terms (Brown, 2018). In a 2014 television
interview, Shamil Tarpischev, Russian president of the Tennis Federation, referred to tennis
superstars and sisters Serena and Venus Williams as “the Williams brothers” and stated, “It’s
scary when you really look at them” (CBS News, 2014, para. 10). As Black women, they were
masculinized as Black men, othering them as brutes and animal-like (Yancy, 2016). As
formidable tennis players, they are frightening or monstrous (Yancy, 2016). This racist discourse
was also assigned to the Black First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, with allegations
that she was a man (Yancy, 2016). Both instances were racist attempts to deny their femininity
and Black womanhood.
The humiliation, insecurity, and sense of powerlessness Black women experience are
systemic through generations (Romano & Ragland, 2018). Post-slavery, Black women
continually endured labels of lasciviousness, were rendered available for service to men, were
thought to be poor mothers, and were subjected to sexual violence (Bailey, 2021; Broussard,
2013; Primm et al., 2019; Roberts, 1997/2017). Bailey (2021) defined these oppressive
experiences of Black women in the coined term “misogynoir” (p. 1). Misogynoir is the “co-
constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their
simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender
marginalization” (Bailey, 2021, p. 1).
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This historic racialized oppression of Black women suggests that they are not worthy of
respect, care, justice, or protection (Bailey, 2021; Roberts, 1997/2017). For example, in 2006, a
group of Black lesbian teens defended themselves against a Black male attacker who took
offense to one of them not responding to his catcalls (Bailey, 2021). He physically attacked the
one he targeted. The others defended against him, and he was stabbed. Media attention focused
on the women who were described in news reports as a “wolf pack,” “a gang of killer lesbians”
(Pasulka, 2015, Why did you want to make this film, para. 1) and “a wolf pack, an inhuman gang
of animals” (Bailey, 2021, p. 14). The media’s othering and microinvalidation serves to vilify,
oppress, and convict these women in the public’s eye. All were charged with felonies and
received harsh prison sentences for protecting themselves against an attacker (Bailey, 2021).
These examples demonstrate the traumatic effects of racialized oppression of Black
women, passed down from American slavery until today (DeGruy, 2005). Black women have
suffered this violence in silence for survival and to protect Black males and their children from
severe, unjust punishment and probable death (Broussard, 2013). During the Jim Crow era, the
most commonly used penalty against Black people for real or made-up infractions was death
(Broussard, 2013; DeGruy, 2005; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). Black women would repeatedly
witness a group of White men taking Black men away for alleged crimes never to see the Black
men again (Broussard, 2013).
Disproportionate and Unjust Killing of Unarmed Black People
Omnipresent structural racism underlies the disproportionate rate of the killings of
unarmed Black males in America compared to Whites (Alang et al., 2017; Aymer, 2016; Chaney
& Robertson, 2013). Structural racism is defined as historical, institutional embedded policies,
laws, practices, and other norms that harm Black people and perpetuate racial inequities (Aymer,
24

2016; Bor et al., 2018). The constant fight for equality, justice, and belonging and the police
killings of Black people combined with the lack of justice for those killings are examples of
structural racism (Bor et al., 2018). The way law enforcement professionals perceive Black
people is directly related to White supremacy’s conceptual characterization of Black people’s
inferiority (Aymer, 2016; Bor et al., 2018; Tolliver et al., 2016). From the period of enslavement
to the present day, the use of police and extrajudicial violence has continued to be a significant
factor in the lived experiences of Black Americans, particularly males, leading to their deaths
(Pratt-Harris et al., 2016).
Society-Sanctioned Racial Violence
Racial terror lynching was, perhaps, the most feared tool in the White supremacy arsenal
to unjustly terrorize and kill Black people (Butler, 2017; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). The
perpetrators were never held accountable for these acts of violence (Equal Justice Initiative,
2017). The evidence shows that over 4,084 racial terror lynchings of Black people—men,
women, and children—were documented as having occurred in 12 southern states between the
end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 (Bennett, 2017; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). During
the same period, 300 or more racial terror lynchings occurred in other states (Equal Justice
Initiative, 2017). On average, a Black person was lynched every 2 days by hanging, burning by a
slow fire, or killed in other gruesome ways and had their body mutilated for unsubstantiated
infractions such as seeking another job, testifying against a White person in court, looking at a
White woman, arguing about the price of vegetables at the market, or being too prosperous
(Bennett, 2017; DeGruy, 2005; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017; Gilbert & Ray, 2016).
Similarly, in recent years, police and vigilante law enforcement have killed Black people
for unsubstantiated minor infractions (Alexander, 2010; Butler, 2017). The killing of unarmed
25

Black people between 1999 and 2020 is arguably akin to lynchings that occurred during the late
19th and early 20th centuries; this time, they are carried out mostly by those who are supposed to
enforce the law (Aymer, 2016). Regardless of the time frame, Black women have been people
most often left to deal with the fallout of watching their Black relatives led off by lynch mobs or
seeing videos of them shot down by police or other race-related violence (Aymer, 2016;
Broussard, 2013).
One of the first documented lynchings was that of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in 1955
(Baker, 2006). Accused of offending a White woman by whistling at her, White men took Till
from his uncle’s home at gunpoint, who beat him, shot him in the head, tied a weight around his
neck, and threw his body into the river (Baker, 2006; Till-Mobley & Benson, 2003). His
confessed killers were acquitted. Till’s mother Mamie Till was left to mourn and fight for justice
for her son, though her identification and recognition of her son’s disfigured body was refuted
(Baker, 2006). In 1901, in Tennessee, Ballie Crutchfield’s brother escaped a near-lynching for
allegedly keeping $120 from a wallet that he found (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). Angry that
he had escaped, the mob lynched his sister Ballie instead, although she was not involved in the
alleged theft (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017; Feimster, 2011).
Women and their unborn children were terrorized and lynched as well. At least seven
documented lynchings were of visibly pregnant Black women (Feimster, 2011). One of the most
brutal was that of Mary Turner, who vowed to seek justice against those who lynched her
husband. Mary, then pregnant, was hanged from a tree, doused with gasoline and motor oil, and
set afire. As her burnt body hanged, a White man took a knife and cut open her stomach in a
crude cesarean surgery. Out fell her baby, who cried feebly before the White man stomped on
and ended the infant’s life (Bennett, 2017; DeGruy, 2005; Feimster, 2011).
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Similar imagery was conjured when in 2019, a police officer shot and killed unarmed
Pamela Turner, who kept walking away and asking him to stop harassing her as he tried to arrest
her. After being tased and falling to the ground, she frantically waved her arms and yelled out,
“I’m pregnant” while on her back (NewsOne Staff, 2021). The officer’s response was a barrage
of bullets. Pamela Turner might not have been pregnant, but the officer, in the moment,
disregarded her statement and murdered her (NewsOne Staff, 2021; Vera & Razek, 2020).
Between 1880 and 1930, 130 Black women were murdered by lynching. These acts were
meant to silence and control Black women. However, many continued to resist and refute White
power at great personal risk (Feimster, 2011). Most of the Black women lynched had challenged
White supremacy (Bennett, 2017; Feimster, 2011). Sandra Bland did so in 2015 as she exercised
agency by pulling over and using her voice to stand up against the White power of the police
officer who tailed her for DWB (Yancy, 2016). She was arrested and mysteriously died by
hanging in her jail cell 3 days later (Yancy, 2016).
This historically racist practice of lynching led three White men to conduct a ritual
lynching of an unarmed Black man in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 (Rushdy, 2012). They picked up
James Byrd as he was walking home, took off his pants and underwear, tied him to their pick-up
truck and dragged him for many miles until his body was dismembered (Rushdy, 2012). Thirteen
years prior to this study, a Black man named Brandon McClelland allegedly had an argument
with White male friends at a bar. Later that evening as he walked from the bar, those friends ran
him over with their pick-up truck and dragged him for over 40 feet before they left his mutilated
body on the side of the road (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017; McKinley, 2009). Brandon’s mother
Jacqueline McClelland, in her fight for justice for her son, had to rely on pressure from civil
rights advocates to get the police to conduct a proper investigation into her son’s death. She
27

recalled that if not for those advocates’ intervention, her son’s killing would have not received
proper attention (McKinley, 2009).
Society denounced the act of violent lynching but subtly replaced the ropes with police
forearms in the form of a chokehold, used to control Black male suspects and coerce them into
submission (Butler, 2017). The chokehold was seen as the next iteration of lynching, and many
police departments in the United States banned it (Butler, 2017). In 1980, Adolph Lyons, a 24-
year-old unarmed Black male, suffered permanent injury to his larynx after being subjected to a
chokehold by Los Angeles police following a traffic stop. A 1980 survey used as part of his
defense in the Supreme Court case revealed that 16 people had died by police chokehold, and 12
of them were unarmed Black males (Alexander, 2010; Butler, 2017; Chemerinsky, 2015).
In July 2014, Eric Garner, an unarmed, 43-year-old Black man, died after being subdued
in a chokehold by New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. He pleaded, “I can’t breathe,”
11 times before succumbing (Butler, 2017, p. xiii). In 2015, 44-year-old unarmed Black man
Eric Harris was pleading, “Oh my God, I’m losing my breath,” as he was being subdued by a
police officer with his knee on Harris’s head and neck (Yancy, 2016, p. 46). The officer
screamed a vile response, “F__ your breath,” and continued to subdue Harris in that chokehold
while another officer simultaneously shot Harris in the back (Yancy, 2016, p. 46). Harris died
from his injuries.
Though she did not die, 33-year-old Safiya Satchell’s January 2020 encounter with law
enforcement bore a similar violent pattern. A police officer dragged the pregnant Satchell from
inside her vehicle, put his knee on her neck to subdue her, and tased her twice in the belly as she
screamed (Reimann, 2020). Safiya did not die, but her baby did (Reimann, 2020). Garner, Harris,
and Satchell’s unborn child died from the historic condemnation of Black bodies supported by
28

society and state-sanctioned racially discriminatory policies and practices (Alexander, 2010;
Butler, 2017; Yancy, 2016).
Blackness is an ontological crime, a crime of just being (Bey, 2016; Torres et al., 2017).
Garner was standing on the sidewalk, Byrd was walking home, Trayvon Martin was walking
back home from the neighborhood store, and Safiya was sitting in her car. Unarmed Black
people fell victims to the actions of police and vigilantes: Amadou Diallo in 1999, Oscar Grant
in 2009, and Trayvon Martin in 2012. Between 2014 and 2021, there were Freddie Gray, Tamir
Rice, LaQuan McDonald, Miles Hall, Stephon Clarke, Michael Brown, Pamela Turner, Yvette
Smith, India Kager, Alteria Woods, Geraldine Townsend, Ariane McCree, Ahmaud Arbery,
Breonna Taylor, Ma’Khia Bryant, Atatiana Jefferson, and George Floyd.
These Black Americans, among many others, were killed while standing, walking,
jogging, shopping, driving, being on a playground, or relaxing in their homes (Alexander, 2010;
Butler, 2017; NewsOne Staff, 2020, 2021). The two commonalities were being unarmed and
being Black (Yancy, 2016). These cases show increasingly worsening conditions for Black
people in this country that suggest walking while Black (WWB), DWB, standing while Black, or
just being Black are crimes often punishable by death (Alexander, 2010; Downey & Mark, 2021;
Gilbert & Ray, 2016; Menakem, 2017; Yancy, 2016).
State-Sanctioned Racial Profiling and Violence
Sanctioned racial-profiling strategies like stop and frisk and DWB led to increased
criminalization and death among Black people (Alexander, 2010; Downey & Mark, 2021;
Gilbert & Ray, 2016). One of the first documented stop-and-frisk actions occurred during the
1917–1918 race riots in Chester, Pennsylvania (Muhammad, 2010). Two White police officers,
Ramsey and Schneider, stopped a Black man, Preston Louis, on the streets. Upon frisking
29

Preston, they found a small pocket knife on him, which they justified to beat him severely.
Preston was taken to the hospital. While he lay receiving medical treatment for the 20 head
wounds he suffered from the beating, Officer Schneider beat him some more over the head with
his police baton. A Black officer witnessing the beating threatened to shoot Officer Schneider in
order for him to stop (Muhammad, 2010).
The U.S. Supreme Court legalized stop and frisk as a practice in 1968. The decision in
Terry v. Ohio gave police the power to stop someone they deem a suspect and pat them down if
they think the person might be armed (Butler, 2017). In 2006, NYPD stopped and frisked
508,540 pedestrians, more than 50% of whom were Black (Alexander, 2010). The department
increased the use of this policy between 2006 and 2010, followed by Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Chicago, and Los Angeles. Over that 4-year period, NYPD made 52,000 stop-and-frisk stops in
the Brownsville neighborhood. Seventy percent of those stopped were Black and Latino males.
A young Black male in this area was stopped and searched about five times a year (Butler,
2017). In 2011, NYPD stopped about 700,000 pedestrians, of whom more than 50% were
frisked. Among the 140,000 people frisked involving the use of force, 55% were Black. Nine out
of 10 Black men stopped and frisked by police, some up to 50 times before age 20, were not
engaging in any wrongdoing (Downey & Mark, 2021; Gilbert & Ray, 2016).
In a study conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois (2019), Black
drivers were stopped and searched 1.8 times more than White drivers between 2015 and 2017,
although Black people made up only 6% of the population in comparison to White people
making up 32%. Fifteen percent of drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike were racial minority
drivers, yet they made up 42% of stops, and 73% of arrests were of Black motorists. In
Maryland, 17% of drivers along a portion of I-95 were Black, yet 70% of those stopped and
30

searched were Black (Alexander, 2010). Often, such traffic stops end in fatal police violence
against Black drivers. Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Kwame Jones, Michael
Dean, Jamee Johnson, and Antwon Rose were a few of the unarmed Black people stopped for
minor traffic infractions between 2015 and 2020 who were killed while in the custody of or
during an encounter with law enforcement (NewsOne Staff, 2020); their crime was DWB.
A precursor to DWB and related police brutality 30 years before this study was the
videotaped report of the beating of Rodney King, who was struck in the head and body over 56
times in Los Angeles in 1991. Police pursued King, a Black man, for speeding. Once he stopped
his car, King apparently moved too slowly in complying with officers’ command to lay face
down on the street and to stay down. The four White police officers who stopped him beat King
with batons, kicked, stomped, and brutalized him while several other officers looked on without
intervening (Martin, 2005; Williams, 2018).
The Stand Your Ground law is another overhauled legal weapon used unjustly in the
demise of many Black people and popularized by George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon
Martin in 2012 (Crump, 2019). Using the Castle Doctrine as its point of reference, which only
included self-defense in the home, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled as early as 1865 that a person in
a space where they lawfully have a right to be and who does not provoke any kind of assault or
harassment does not have to retreat but can stand their ground and defend themselves (Johnson et
al., 2015; Neyland, 2008). By 1914, courts added clarification that a person’s dwelling could be a
car, not just house, and workplaces were included in the law (Johnson et al., 2015; Neyland,
2008). In 1921, a ruling from the Supreme Court dictated that if a person believes that their life is
in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm from an attacker, the person can stand their
31

ground in self-defense. If they kill the attacker in defending themselves, they will have immunity
from all prosecution (Neyland, 2008; Randolph, 2014).
In 2005 and 2007, Florida and Texas, respectively, set their own rules on Stand Your
Ground laws (Randolph, 2014). They changed the definition of self-defense and removed all
requirements around the duty to retreat. The revised law allowed people to stand their ground
wherever they were, not just in their dwelling or workplace. It created the presumption of
reasonableness, meaning that a person reasonably believed they needed to use deadly force to
protect themselves. It also elevated the presumption of fear to the person standing their ground,
meaning that that person was afraid or established fear that they believed they would be
confronted with unlawful deadly force. Finally, it gave police officers the authority to decide on
the scene if the use of deadly force was justifiable and if they should make an arrest (Johnson et
al., 2015; Munasib et al., 2018; Randolph, 2014). As of January 1, 2020, 34 states had adopted
modified Stand Your Ground laws and expanded Castle Doctrine to include application beyond
the home (RAND Corporation, 2020).
The use of Stand Your Ground laws is widespread, and those laws are problematic for
Black people. From a CRT perspective, being a Black man in America is inextricably linked to
being criminal, up to no good, highly likely to engage in a felonious act, naturally prone to
violence and other aggressive behaviors, and being feared (Bey, 2016; Butler, 2017; Muhammad,
2010; Smiley & Fakunle, 2016). These are all premises that frame the new Stand Your Ground
laws. George Zimmerman viewed Black teenager Trayvon Martin through this frame: a guy who
“looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something;” “He’s a Black male;” and “These
assholes. They always get away” (Yancy & Jones, 2013, p. 10). Florida’s Stand Your Ground
law essentially says, “Go ahead and shoot; the law will have your back and protect you,” which
32

is what Zimmerman did when he killed the unarmed Martin (Johnson et al., 2015, p. 115). By the
time the police, whom Zimmerman had called for help, arrived on the scene, Marting was dead
on the ground, and Zimmerman, who had pursued him, claimed that he feared for his life and
stood his ground. As allowed by law, the officers believed and accepted Zimmerman’s account
and let him go home, free (Florini, 2017; Johnson et al., 2015; Yancy & Jones, 2013). The same
law led to his eventual acquittal.
An unarmed Black woman named Renisha McBride, then aged 19, crashed her car in the
middle of the night while driving through Dearborn Heights, Michigan, a predominantly White
suburban area near Detroit. She walked up to a house and banged on the door to seek help and
safety. Theodore Wafer, the 55-year-old White owner of the home, reported seeing a “shadowy
figure” (i.e., Black). He was concerned about “crime” in his neighborhood and that the
neighborhood was becoming increasingly “dangerous;” and discovering “drug paraphernalia”
(Yancy, 2016, p. 290). Shadowy, crime, dangerous, and drugs are all words with racial
undertones usually connected to Black people. With this stereotype narrative occupying his
psyche, Wafer shot Renisha in the face, killing her on his porch. He first claimed that his shotgun
discharged accidentally but later claimed stand-your-ground immunity because he was protecting
his home, which he thought was about to be burglarized when Renisha knocked on his door
(Yancy, 2016).
McBride, like Martin and many others, had done something wrong: they were where they
were not supposed to be, Black contaminants in White spaces (Yancy, 2016). They were shot
and killed for the burglarizing of homes they never did, the physical violence or threats they
never caused, and the formidability and pain of biases they did not ascribe to themselves (Cheng,
2018; Yancy, 2016), much like 17-year-old Jordan Davis, whom Michael Dunn shot and killed
33

because of rap music coming from Davis’s car. Davis and his teenage friends were playing music
too loud and occupying Dunn ’s White space at a public gas station and Dunn “didn ’t know he
was [17]” and “thought he was a full-grown man” (Cheng, 2018, p. 6).
In court, Dunn invoked a stand-your-ground defense. He claimed that the 5’11,” 145-
pound, unarmed Jordan—who never got out of his car—threatened Dunn ’s life like a man. Dunn,
6’4,” 250-pounds, and armed, claimed that Jordan presented a clear-and-present danger against
him (ABC News, 2014; Cheng, 2018; NBC News, 2014). By his own testimony at trial, Dunn
engaged the teens. Dunn requested they turn down their music, which they did. He verbally
pursued and escalated the situation with the teens. Dunn grabbed his gun and fired into the teens’
car. Dunn got out of his car and kept firing his gun even when the teens were driving away, yet
he claimed self-defense under Florida ’s Stand Your Ground law (ABC News, 2014). In a study
using state-level crime data from 2000 to 2010, Cheng and Hoekstra (2013), concluded that
Stand Your Ground laws increased reported murders and non-negligent manslaughters by a net
8%. The study also found no significant change in the level of deterrence of other general crimes
such as burglary and robbery. Between 2000 and 2010, more than 20 states adopted Stand Your
Ground laws (Cheng & Hoekstra, 2013).
Lack of Justice for the Unjust Killings
In America, “to be Black is, by definition, to have done something wrong” (Bey, 2016, p.
275) through the interpretive White gaze (Bey, 2016; Johnson et al., 2015; Yancy, 2016). This
condemnation is legitimized by the country’s laws that discriminate against minoritized citizens
to “uphold this country’s dedication to White supremacy” (Crump, 2019, p. 85). Black people
are held more accountable by the legal system. They experience incomparable sentencing, lack
of leniency, grace, and other accountability measures for crimes comparable to those of White
34

people (Crump, 2019; Griffith et al., 2018). To be specific, this includes being incarcerated at a
rate five times higher than White people and being intentionally targeted for harsher punishment
(Gilbert & Ray, 2016; Griffith et al., 2018). Black people are more likely to be punished for
crimes against White people than White people for crimes against Black people and are more
likely to be the victims of justifiable murders (Gilbert & Ray, 2016; Griffith et al., 2018). Further
evidence shows that for death row inmates, if the victim was White, the defendant is more likely
to be executed (Griffith et al., 2018). Since 1976, 20 White defendants convicted of murdering
Black people were executed compared to 287 Black defendants convicted of murdering White
people (Griffith et al., 2018).
The totality of how America demonstrates that Black lives do not matter is reflected in
multiple forms of injustice, such as little to no prosecution for those who kill unarmed Black
citizens. Despite public outcry, demands for justice by Black political and civil rights leaders,
and video evidence of the murders of Black people, in most cases, police and vigilantes who kill
unarmed Black people were not held accountable (Butler, 2017; Gilbert & Ray, 2016). Black
Americans are almost three times more likely to be killed by police than their White
counterparts, and of the 300 Blacks killed each year, 25% are unarmed (Bor et al., 2018). White
America’s unwritten playbook for Black people, especially Black males, follows the garbage
in/garbage out phenomenon. The garbage in is anxiety about Black men that is internalized, and
the garbage out is laws and policies based on this anxiety, which treat Black men as public
enemies who, therefore, must be purged from society (Butler, 2017).
Between 2009 and 2020, there were 76 high-profile killings of unarmed Black males by
police and others (NewsOne Staff, 2020). A random snapshot of 10 of those cases showed that
the police officers were not prosecuted or convicted eight of the instances. In the cases of
35

Terrence Crutcher, Philando Castile, Samuel DuBose, Freddie Gray, Walter L. Scott, LaQuan
McDonald, Akai Gurley, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, the officers were
convicted in only two of these instances for manslaughter and negligent homicide. All others
were acquitted, found not guilty, or had the charges dropped. One other pled to a much lesser
charge. Since 2015, law enforcement officers have killed nine unarmed Black women: India
Kager, Bettie Jones, Jessica Nelson-Williams, Alteria Woods, Cynthia Fields, Atatiana Jefferson,
Pamela Turner, Natasha McKenna, and Breonna Taylor (NewsOne Staff, 2021). To date, none of
the officers involved in those deaths has been convicted. Most have had no charges filed against
them (Doggett & Lewis, 2020; NewsOne Staff, 2020, 2021).
Police and citizens like George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of all charges in the fatal
shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin, have been cleared of charges of violence and murder when
they voice this negative, criminal, public enemy perception (othering) of their Black victims in
their defense testimonies. They use this perception to explain their fear of the alleged imminent
threat the victims posed, which triggered the use of deadly force (“Black lives discounted,” 2021;
Johnson et al., 2015; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016). Between 2005 and 2013, fatal cases invoking
Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law with White accusers and Black victims were six cases with
one conviction. Black accusers and White victims were four cases with three convictions
(Johnson et al., 2015). In court, jurors’ implicit racial bias can be activated by narratives that
devalue Black victims and vilify them using trigger words like “hostility,” “aggression,”
“weapons,” “violence,” “drugs,” and “danger” to amplify that narrative (“Black lives
discounted,” 2021). Such narratives make it highly probable that the killing will be deemed
justifiable and the defendants acquitted. Less than 2% of civilian homicides are ruled justifiable,
36

and 17% of those are dismissed as justifiable when the killer is White and the victim is a Black
man (“Black lives discounted,” 2021).
Alexander (2010) and Aymer (2016) noted that these killings and lack of consequences
for the killers are grounded in America’s long history of legally allowed violence against Black
Americans and interminable inequities in the criminal justice system. They highlight that
mainstream America does not see enough value in Black lives to mitigate this problem. Black
people have to fight for the right to survive in a system where the rules are not the same for them
as for others. This persistent fight for equality and justice gave rise to many sociopolitical
movements, from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter (Nix et al., 2017; Romano &
Ragland, 2018; Winters, 2020). These movements give Black Americans a degree of hope and
staying power to temper the constant state of fear, trauma, and oppression that can cause them
psychological upheaval (Wade, 2020; Winters, 2020).
Race-Based Trauma/PTSD
Race-based incidents and continued oppression have been a source of emotional and
psychological harm for Black people (Carter, 2007). Experts in the mental health field label it as
race-based trauma. It is a conditioned emotional response of severe stress, anxiety, fear, and pain
that arises when a Black person experiences loss or injury because of a racism-related incident or
is exposed to an incident that triggers memories and fear of historic and continuing abuse and
oppression (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Carter, 2007; Danieli, 1998). Incidents of racism can be
direct, as in the institution of slavery and the reign of terror lynchings Black people suffered
during the Jim Crow era. However, the incidents are mostly indirect, subtle, and systemic
(Carter, 2007; Tolliver et al., 2016). The latter characterization of racist incidents is what
supports the neglect and undervaluing of the traumatic, intergenerational impact of societal
37

oppression on Black people. It also explains the subsequent lack of effective intervention and
treatment strategies (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Carter, 2007).
One distinct psychological impact of the incidents of systemic racism from slavery to the
present is a form of PTSD known as post-traumatic slave syndrome (DeGruy, 2005). The
syndrome presents as historic, multigenerational trauma manifested in the lives of Black people
from years of slavery coupled with continued oppression, inaccessibility to societal benefits
available to others, and persistent inequity and dehumanizing (DeGruy, 2005). Black people are
born with an “inadvertent birthmark over their entire bodies,” Black skin, that makes them the
subordinate caste in a White supremacist world (Wilkerson, 2020, p. 42). This subordination has
led to a pattern of denigration, profiling, police brutality, and killing of unarmed Black people by
police and vigilantes, all endemic to life in America (Tolliver et al., 2016).
This pattern of criminalizing, chronic police brutality, and related deaths of unarmed
Black people result in a variety of challenges for Black people, including mental concerns,
depression, anxiety, anger, fear, hopelessness; physical diseases like heart disease, hypertension,
ulcers, cancer, and insomnia; and behavioral problems like drug and alcohol use, isolation,
shutting down, cognitive dissonance (Alang et al., 2017; Bryant-Davis et al., 2017). Overall, the
few studies on Black Americans’ experience with police killings of unarmed Black people found
that Black people reported a higher number of poor mental health days and increased depressive
disorders following these killings (Bor et al., 2018; Curtis et al., 2021). Curtis et al. (2021)
concluded that in the week following a highly publicized police killing of a Black person, Black
people experienced on average 0.13 more poor mental health days and an average of 0.06 poor
mental health days over the next 7 weeks. Bor et al. (2018) concluded that each police killing of
an unarmed Black person was associated with 0.14 poor mental health days among Black
38

Americans, which translates to 1.7 poor mental health days per person every year for a
cumulative 55 million poor mental health days per year for Black Americans.
State of Black Women ’s Mental Health
Society has ignored the state of Black women’s mental health (Evans et al., 2017).
Generally, treatment for mental health conditions is rare in the Black community (Snyder, 2020).
The ways in which research addresses the status of Black mental health are flawed because they
do not focus on the Black reality of systemic racism (Wilkerson, 2020). Further, there is a lack of
significant diagnostic and treatment studies regarding Black women’s mental health, although
they share a disproportionate amount of life stressors, being Black, female, and economically
disenfranchised (Evans et al., 2017; Kelly & Greene, 2010).
Black women have endured a long history of being othered, marginalized, and devalued.
This history contributes to them being invisible in that they are expected to do it all, fix it all, and
carry it all without complaint, in silence (Evans et al., 2017; Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003;
Wilkerson, 2020). These expectations would cause undue stress for anyone, particularly those
who face compounded, complex, multigenerational oppression. However, efforts to address the
mental fortitude of Black women who have been systemically subjected to intersecting inhumane
treatment are non-existent (Wilkerson, 2020).
As a carryover from the days of slavery, Black women feel the need and are often
inherently compelled to make sacrifices to protect their families, their community, and their race,
often at great, unacknowledged risk to their mental and physical health (Kelly & Greene, 2010;
Williams, 2008). Black women mask these risks very well and continue to pass for normal
(Evans et al., 2017; Williams, 2008). This passing means they hide their pain and needs and put
everything else in front of caring for themselves with the attitude that they have it all under
39

control (Williams, 2008). They become desensitized to their depression and pain, hiding them
because they fear letting people down or going against the belief that they can handle anything
(Evans et al., 2017; Williams, 2008). This internal and invisible shifting they do to meet
everyone’s needs sets aside their own needs, which slowly diminishes their self-efficacy and
their feelings of complete personhood and centeredness (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003).
Without a conscious alignment of the symptoms with unusual behavior, Black women are
passing for normal while they are battling serious depression, anxiety, and other mental health
concerns beneath the surface (Evans et al., 2017; Williams, 2008). Some of the symptoms are
common actions like overeating, over-spending, and overworking (Jones & Shorter-Gooden,
2003; Williams, 2008). Overeating, for example, is a mode of coping used to numb or mask
psychological pain or depression (Williams, 2008). Two-thirds of adult Black women are
overweight, and about 50% of them are obese, which is statistically higher than any other race or
ethnic group in America (Evans et al., 2017). Black women are overeating twice as much as
White women (Evans et al., 2017). Correspondingly, statistical evidence shows that Black
women’s documented rate of depression is twice as much as Black men and 50% higher than
White women (Forsythe, 2017; Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018; Williams, 2008).
Black women encounter various forms of discrimination daily because of their
intersecting identities of womanhood, Blackness, and, often, poverty (Evans et al., 2017;
Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). Black women are at the bottom of every societal stratum when it
comes to being oppressed and are compelled to “engage in the exhausting and stressful task of
playing several roles to survive” (Evans et al., 2017, p. 32). This engagement results in serious
physical and mental deterioration of their bodies (Evans et al., 2017). Encounters with multiple
forms of oppression based on their subordinate identities can occur both inside and outside of
40

their communities, which means that they are constantly in a heightened state of anxiety to
protect themselves (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018; Williams, 2008).
The combination of racism-related incidents that are intergenerational, daily
microstressors, and life events renders Black women much more vulnerable to race-related
trauma and consequential long-term PTSD (Danieli, 1998; Harrell, 2000; Pieterse et al., 2013).
For instance, heightened anxiety is a constant for Black women related to “raising and loving
their Black males in a society that finds them so expendable” (Evans et al., 2017, p. 32). Not
having any solid assurance from one moment to the next if their Black boys or men will return
home when they leave or if today is the day that they will be falsely accused of a crime they did
not commit is harrowing for Black women (Evans et al., 2017). This expendability keeps Black
men disproportionately incarcerated, endangered, and easily killed by police or vigilantes with
impunity (Alexander, 2010; Gilbert & Ray, 2016). Black women are left to deal with the trauma
of these deaths, which is slowly killing them (Smith, 2016).
Impact of Unjust Killings on Black Women ’s Mental Health
For 3 years, Venida Browder fought to get her young son released from a Rikers Island
prison in New York City (Smith, 2018). Two weeks before his 17th birthday, her son Kalief
Browder was arrested, charged with theft of a backpack, and remanded to Rikers Island with bail
set at $3,000. The Browder family could not afford to pay, nor could they raise, the $900 a
bondsman required at the moment (“Kalief Browder,” 2021). By the time Venida secured the
$900, Kalief’s bail was revoked. A year earlier, he pled guilty to a charge of stealing a bakery
truck and taking it on a joy ride, for which he received probation and youthful offender status.
From 2010 to 2013, Kalief remained on Rikers Island. He was abused and beaten severely and
41

spent nearly 2 years in solitary confinement awaiting trial for a crime for which he refused to
plead guilty in a plea bargain offered to him twice (Brill, 2017; “Kalief Browder,” 2021).
On the evening of his arrest, Kalief thought that he was being subjected to stop and frisk
by NYPD. As a young Black male, this happened to him multiple times a month (“Kalief
Browder,” 2021). Kalief attempted suicide multiple times during his incarceration. By the time
Venida succeeded in getting her son released, the trauma of his solitary confinement and abuse,
and the hopelessness she experienced fighting for justice for him, exacted a deadly emotional toll
on him and her, respectively (Smith, 2018). He took his life 2 years after his release, following
the dismissal of his case. In 2016, Venida Browder died of complications from a heart attack, 16
months after her son’s death.
Paul V. Prestia, a civil attorney for the family, stated, “In my opinion, she literally died of
a broken heart.” The “stress from this crusade coupled with the strain of the pending lawsuits
against the city and the pain from the death were too much for her to bear” (“Kalief Browder,”
2021, para. 33). Kalief’s brother Akeem expressed similar sentiments: “My mother has been
holding herself strong, but she’s heartbroken” (“Kalief Browder,” 2021, para. 33).
The outcome for Venida Browder is common among Black women. Racism kills Black
women (Smith, 2018) physically and mentally. To understand the impact of these killings, it is
important to reckon with how slavery, misogyny, racism, and poverty have affected them
(Griffith et al., 2018). This reckoning is addressed throughout this chapter. Black women endure
a lifetime of suffering race-based stress injury due to the intergenerational fatigue of centuries of
systemic racism, from witnessing their Black males and children bought, sold, brutalized, and
murdered during slavery to watching them lynched during the Jim Crow era to viewing today’s
42

legally sanctioned murder of them in the streets and jails replayed in the media and being
hopeless and helpless to protect them (Carter, 2007; Winters, 2020).
This level of emotional and psychological injury leads to medical injury, including heart
disease, stroke, chronic obesity, drug use, high blood pressure, and diabetes (Alang et al., 2017;
Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Winters, 2020). Such was the case for Erica Garner, the daughter of
Eric Garner. Erica suffered a massive heart attack on Christmas Eve 2017. She died on
December 30 after related extensive brain damage. Smith (2018) contended that Erica’s heart
was strained from years of stress from racism and poverty but declined faster over the last 2
years as she grieved and fought for justice for her father. The trauma of watching the video of
her father being choked to death replayed in the media took a toll on her body and psychological
health (Democracy Now, 2018; Smith, 2018). In several interviews over the 2 years, Erica talked
about her lingering sadness at the loss of her father as well as the financial constraints of seeking
therapy to deal with the grief that Black families like hers who live below the poverty threshold
face (Democracy Now, 2018, 14:34).
In a 2016 interview for PBS News Hour, clinical psychologist Monica Williams said the
continuous replay of videos on network television, along with social media posts showing the
final moments of Black people murdered in the streets by police, causes heightened fear and
anxiety and is mentally and emotionally traumatizing (Downs, 2016). Vicarious trauma, as
Williams called it, combined with everyday oppression can evoke psychological problems
indicative of post-traumatic stress syndrome (Downs, 2016; Smith, 2016). For victims' families,
encountering those videos seems almost inescapable (Downs, 2016). In an interview, Gina Best,
mother of unarmed India Kager, who was killed by police on September 5, 2015, stated about the
impact of reliving India’s death, “There’s going to be someone else killed. And it starts it all over
43

again, the festering wound that acid is poured in. It starts it over and over again. And yet our
daughters are still erased” (African American Policy Forum, 2020, 1:05:43).
Black women are reminded of the lynchings many were forced to watch during the Jim
Crow era. It was a way to scare them and maintain White supremacist control over Black lives
(Broussard, 2013; DeGruy, 2005; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). Seeing the videos of the
present-day killings is tantamount to being at a lynching daily and having the trans-generational
traumatic scar opened, causing nightmares and the inability to eat or sleep (Downs, 2016).
LaKiza experienced these manifestations of PTSD. LaKiza is the sister of Larry Jackson, an
unarmed Black man whom a detective from the Austin Police Department beat and shot in the
back of the head in 2013. Jackson was wrongfully accused of robbery (Austin While Black,
2017; Smith, 2016). LaKiza shared that, following Larry’s death, she lost 30 pounds because she
could not eat. Her 13-year-old daughter lost 25 pounds because she, too, could not eat, and her
mother’s health deteriorated. She described that every time the police kill another Black person
and the videos are shown, “it’s like ripping the scab off of a healing wound: I relive Larry’s
death all over again” (Austin While Black, 2017, 4:49).
The impact of these killings on Black women’s mental health is not straightforward, as
there are “many, many layers of unimaginable pain” (African American Policy Forum, 2020,
1:23:44). They bear financial costs, romantic relationship strains, inaccurate and distorted media
coverage about their loved ones, and lack of indictments or convictions of the perpetrators,
which all contribute to the constant, long-term assault on their mental and physical health
(African American Policy Forum, 2020). Regardless of race, burying a child is traumatic for a
parent (Yancy & Jones, 2013). Compounding this trauma for Black mothers is that systemic
bigotry, poverty, and oppression—things they cannot control—contribute largely to the
44

criminalizing and death of their children (Evans et al., 2017; Winters, 2020; Yancy & Jones,
2013).
In light of these killings, especially when they are of young children, Black mothers also
must fight the historical stereotyping of themselves as unfit, bad mothers who corrupted their
babies in the womb and did not raise their children well (Roberts, 1997/2017; Yancy & Jones,
2013). The problems in the Black family and community were planted historically at the feet of
Black women as being their root cause (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). For Black women who
have protected their families and communities since slavery, this blame causes them to shift
emotionally and disconnect from their grief to invoke defensiveness (Jones & Shorter-Gooden,
2003; Williams, 2008). Modulating between these collective internal and external forces leads to
what Winters (2020) described as Black fatigue:
Repeated variations of stress that result in extreme exhaustion and cause mental, physical,
and spiritual maladies are passed down from generation to generation. It is deeply
embedded fatigue that takes inordinate amounts of energy to overcome—herculean
efforts to sustain an optimistic outlook and enormous amounts of faith to continue to
believe “we shall overcome someday.” (p. 33).
The Myth of Black Women ’s Resiliency
The literature on this topic is limited. Most of the information comes from deduction on
stories about Black women in slavery and not much empirical research. Nonetheless, the works
available are redundant and support the conclusion identified over time: Black women are strong,
but they also are exhausted.
In relation to the seemingly continuous killing of their unarmed Black relatives, Black
women sacrifice moments of personal bereavement to seek justice for their loved ones. This is at
45

great risk to themselves because the grief does not subside (Yancy & Jones, 2013). Those who
have lost relatives to unjust killings “walk every day with literal amputated hearts every single
day, and it hurts,” stated Gina Best (African American Policy Forum, 2020, 1:05:00). So, how do
they cope with this level of exhaustion and hurt? By invoking the strong Black woman, “I am
everything to everyone, I am ok” syndrome, shifting, and suffering in silence (Jones & Shorter-
Gooden, 2003; Roberts, 1997/2017). On the one hand, Black women receive the message daily
that they are inferior to all others while, on the other hand, they are perceived as able to endure
all levels of hardship, persevere, and be present to take care of everyone else’s needs (Bailey,
2021; DeGruy, 2005; Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003).
After all, what population could endure centuries of violent abuse by men who owned
them, rape, forced experimentation on their bodies in the name of science and medicine, and
having their children ripped from their arms, brutalized before them and sold, never to be seen
again? (Bennett, 2017; DeGruy, 2005; Feimster, 2011; Weld, 1839/2013). The trauma of slavery,
as Black women experience it, is intergenerational (Danieli, 1998). There has been no healing for
them from it (Menakem, 2017). Instead, it has been compounded by generations of racialized
and sexual trauma, amplified by microagressions, discrimination, police and civilian killings of
their sons, daughters, and other relatives, and the subsequent exoneration of the perpetrators
(Menakem, 2017).
Over the years, Black people have developed a form of resilience to protect them from
more damage and pain (Menakem, 2017). For Black women, this resilience shows up as the
strong Black woman (SBW) or Superwoman identity, although they may suffer in secret (Jones
& Shorter-Gooden, 2003; Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). Two main characteristics are indicative of
SBW identity: strength and caregiving (Donovan & West, 2015). Strength is the perception of
46

Black women’s natural resilience as being able to handle any stress or difficulty and being
resolute in their independence and emotional reservoir to not be shaken by stress and trauma
(Donovan & West, 2015; Stanton et al., 2017).
Caregiving for Black women speaks to sacrificing their own needs to care for others first
and being perpetually last on their list for caring and support (Donovan & West, 2015; Evans et
al., 2017; Williams, 2008). This false resilience of SBW masks and, perhaps, numbs internal
turmoil. At the same time, their maternal instincts emerge as they work to ensure everyone else is
safe, protected, and nurtured physically and emotionally (Williams, 2008). As Evans et al. (2017)
concluded, “The paradox of the Strong Black Woman is that while it was developed as a defense
against structural oppression, its embodiment predisposes Black women to a wide range of
mental and physical health problems” (p. 11).
Intertwined with the myth of the SBW are the myths of silence and unshakability (Jones
& Shorter-Gooden, 2003; Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). “I’m OK” or “I don’t want to talk about
it,” and shame are all responses used by Black women when they encounter stressful or traumatic
incidents. Black people have been taught not to discuss private matters in public. Talking to a
mental health professional, a stranger, is frowned upon (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). They cannot
discuss their challenges openly as that presents a sign of weakness, which is unacceptable
(Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). Additionally, talking to a mental health professional often labels a
person as mentally ill. The stigma of mental illness is suppressed, silenced, and avoided among
Black people (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018).
Silencing dates back several generations as Black women were punished more during
slavery for showing weakness in the form of being sad, pleading, deranged, or even physical
illness. The testimonies of F.C. Macy and another White businessman identified as T.D.M., both
47

of whom witnessed to the cruelty of slavery, shared a story of a pregnant slave, Rachel, who
complained of feeling sick one morning and unable to go into the field. The overseer whipped
Rachel as she pleaded, “I can’t work today—I’m sick” (Weld, 1839/2013, p. 270). He then gave
her some medicine, dragged her from the house, and followed her as she tried to walk to the
field. After a while, she collapsed from exhaustion, was taken back to the house, and underwent
an abortion, which jeopardized her life (Weld, 1839/2013). As discussed earlier, another slave
who had her child taken from her 3 weeks after giving birth became deranged: “She would leave
her work and go into the woods and sing” (Weld, 1839/2013, p. 272). The master had her
whipped. Stories like these conditioned Black women through generations to be silent in their
pain, to not complain or show weakness (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018), and often leave them
internally angry at themselves and in mental pain.
The myth of unshakability says Black women do not cry because they are “tough, pushy,
and in charge rather than soft, feminine, and vulnerable” (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003, p. 18).
The myth assigns two stereotypes to Black women when dealing with trauma: either the SBW,
which was already addressed, or the angry victim (Evans et al., 2017). The latter, also defined as
the angry Black woman (ABW), is a one-dimensional misrecognition of the Black woman as a
whole person who can be tender and tough, vulnerable and strong, all at the same time (Jones &
Shorter-Gooden, 2003; Wade, 2020). Eventually, the constant message that they are tough and
threatening becomes engrained in Black women’s psyche, which is characteristic of
unshakability.
The myth of unshakability purports that angry Black women are capable of enduring
more pain, defending themselves, and misrecognizing their grief (Wade, 2020). As a result, when
facing trauma brought on by the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives, anger becomes the
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coping mechanism because Black women are not allowed to be vulnerable even among their
family and friends (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). However, no one wants to be around the
ABW or witness her grief when the dominant emotion is anger (Wade, 2020). These competing
dualities ultimately silence Black women and make them invisible in traumatic situations (Jones
& Shorter-Gooden, 2003; Wade, 2020), both mentally and physically. They might retreat to
seclusion or isolation to cope with the stress (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018).
Theoretical Framework
The intersection of race, racism, and Black womanhood is the common thread woven
throughout this study. This review combined perspectives from CRT and intersectionality to
form the basis for analyzing how Black women experience the killing of their unarmed Black
relatives in America, especially the impact on their mental health. It is designed to unpack the
experiences of Black women, who are often the invisible victims of these unjust killings (Smith,
2018).
Understanding Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
Critical race theory challenges the basic thinking and application of racism. First, it posits
that racism is permanent and structural, meaning that it is built into all of America’s systems,
institutions, and culture, including the law, its enforcement, and its historic unequal protection of
Black people in America (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). It further posits
that racism is a normal order of unjust and oppressive processes with corresponding, perpetual,
unjust, and oppressive consequences for the marginalized group, who, in this case, are Black
people (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Jones, 2000; Siegel, 2020). These processes and
consequences are spread across five intersecting pillars that form the basic foundation of CRT:
the centrality of race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of subordination, the
49

challenge of dominant ideology, the commitment to social justice, the centrality of experiential
knowledge, and the transdisciplinary perspective (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
Singularly, each of the five pillars can be handled to some resolution. However, CRT
contends that they work collectively. Therein lies the challenge of dismantling structural racism
that first considered Black people non-human, keeping them at a complete and perpetual
disadvantage to other racial and ethnic groups in America (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
Structural/systemic racism is societal, not individual (Bonilla-Silva, 2021). However, the focus is
often on blatant, personally mediated racism (Jones, 2000), such as Black people being followed
while shopping, DWB, or police officer brutality and hate crimes. Critical race theory submits
that all levels of racism—institutionalized racism, personally mediated racism, and internalized
racism—must be addressed simultaneously, as well as the current conditions for Black people
that resulted from these levels of racism in the past and present (Jones, 2000; Siegel, 2020). It is
the only way for sustainable transformative change to occur that eliminates racism, sexism, and
poverty and empowers subordinated minoritized people (Jones, 2000; Solórzano & Yosso,
2002).
Intersectionality illuminates the layered, intersecting identities and experiences of Black
women that shape the systemic humiliation, dismissal, invisibility, and injustices they face in
America (Romano & Ragland, 2018). For Black women, the overlapping subordinate identities
of race, gender, and poverty make them susceptible to double and triple discrimination
(Crenshaw, 1989). However, anti-discrimination laws are based on single-identity issues
generally tied to the experiences of those in dominant, privileged identity spheres. In 1989,
Crenshaw developed and defined the concept of intersectionality following an analysis of three
cases in which Black women sued their employers on the basis of race and sex.
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In two of the three cases, the courts ruled against the Black women, claiming that the
court did not recognize compound discrimination and that Title VII was not intended to create a
new protected classification of “Black women,” rendering their claims invalid. The Black
women’s claims had to be considered on the basis of historical employment of White women
(Crenshaw, 1989; Winters, 2020). In the third case, the Black women brought a race
discrimination suit on behalf of all Black employees. They received a partial victory because the
courts ruled that there was extensive racial discrimination; however, the courts refused to allow
the Black women to represent Black men in their claim (Crenshaw, 1989).
Single-identity consideration puts Black women at a disadvantage compared to other
marginalized groups (Crenshaw, 1989). Hill Collins (2000) argued that the social organization of
systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and age “shape Black
women’s experiences and, in turn, are shaped by Black women” (p. 299). Both Crenshaw (1989)
and Hill Collins submitted that one identity is not subordinate to another in terms of
intersectionality. For instance, a race-gender intersection for Black women should not be taken
as a Black part and a female part but as a unified whole (Hill Collins, 2000).
Williams (2008) captured the intersection dilemma, the “double whammy” faced by
Black women as they are confronted with the question of being a woman and the problem of
being Black.
• Women are discriminated against as a group, regardless of race and ethnic roots.
• African Americans are also discriminated against as a group, regardless of gender.
• Since we’re both Black and women, that’s how we get “the double whammy” (p. 35)
Understanding how racism intersects with sexism and poverty helps to understand the societal
trauma, personal trauma, and invisibility Black women experience (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017).
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Application of CRT and Intersectionality to the Problem
As indicative of these theories, the centrality of history and contemporary context and the
centrality of experiential knowledge are emphasized. For Black women, there is a long history of
chronic exposure to race-based societal violence directly and vicariously. This violence—
perpetrated and permitted by police, other levels of self-appointed law enforcement, and
citizens—have taken the lives of many unarmed Black people (Hawkins, 2021). Many scholars
have likened the killing of Trayvon Martin to that of Emmett Till (Bey, 2016). Martin was
criminalized long ago by a system that permeated American culture with an absolute belief that
“Blackness signifies an epidermal confession of guilt” (Bey, 2016, p. 2). It is the same belief on
which Till’s murder was predicated (Bey, 2016).
Martin and Till, both teenagers, fell victim to the anti-Black ethos present at all levels of
the social ecology, which is designed to maintain White supremacy (Bey, 2016; Crenshaw et al.,
1995; Smiley & Fakunle, 2016). These boys were not allowed to just be victims. Instead, the
narratives that preceded and followed their deaths further dehumanized and criminalized them
and blamed them for their demise (Yancy & Jones, 2013). Critical race theory proposes that the
reversal should occur; the experience of their deaths should be viewed through a strength-based
lens and used to headline the insidiousness of race and racism (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). It is
what Mamie Till aimed to do by displaying Emmett’s disfigured face and body so that the world
could see what the evil of racism looks like (Baker, 2006). In so doing, she hoped that people
“would see their own responsibility in pushing for an end to this evil” (Till-Mobley & Benson,
2003, p. 142).
The mothers of Till and Martin were left to grapple with the pain of losing their
irreplaceable sons. However, the pain of Black mothers losing a child is not new, as, throughout
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American history, Black children have been devalued unless they were used for White people’s
economic gain (Yancy & Jones, 2013). The contemporary comparison to this economic
exploitation was reported 3 months after Trayvon Martin’s murder: Mother’s Day 2012. An
online firearms sales and auction site advertised the sale of gun-range targets that featured a
darkened hoodie with images of a bag of skittles and a can of iced tea, likened to Martin
(Cooney, 2012). The seller of the targets told an Orlando news reporter that their main
motivation for selling the targets was to make money from Martin’s death (Cooney, 2012).
That act and lack of societal protection for her son must have added pain and trauma for
Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton (Yancy & Jones, 2013). Sybrina Fulton and Mamie Till, like
many other Black women, experienced much ridicule as they tried to protect and humanize their
children in their deaths (Baker, 2006; Dicker/sun, 2008; Till-Mobley & Benson, 2003; Yancy &
Jones, 2013). Their experience demonstrates how race and racism were centered and
simultaneously aligned with other forms of subordination like gender and class discrimination,
another defining principle of CRT (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
The experience of community and institutionalized violence is important to acknowledge.
The violent tyranny of slavery and lynching devalued Black lives to uphold White supremacy
(DeGruy, 2005; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017; Tolliver et al., 2016). During Reconstruction
(1865–1877), lynching became the system of control necessary to keep free Black people in their
place within the racial hierarchy (Smiley & Fakunle, 2016; Tolliver et al., 2016). Black people
were gaining social, economic, and political capital, which challenged White supremacy’s
narrative that Black people were “lazy, unintelligent, animal-like and uncivilized” (Pratt-Harris
et al., 2016). CRT calls into question this dominant-belief status quo of White superiority and
Black inferiority (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
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The final tenet of CRT, the transdisciplinary perspective, emphasizes that race and racism
should be analyzed in both historical and contemporary contexts (Crenshaw et al., 1995;
Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). The terror lynchings of unarmed Black people by vigilantes and the
general White public have much in common with the police, vigilantes, and general public
killings of unarmed Black people today (Smiley & Fakunle, 2016; Tolliver et al., 2016). 1n 2014,
a police officer fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (Smiley
& Fakunle, 2016; U.S. Department of Justice, 2015; Yancy, 2016). Similar to the public
spectacle of lynching, Brown’s body lay in the street for hours as people gathered and watched
(Smiley & Fakunle, 2016; U.S. Department of Justice, 2015). Racialized trauma is embedded
deeply in the souls of Black people. It constricts them and limits their abilities to live full lives
because it is pervasive and persistent (DeGruy, 2005; Menakem, 2017).
Conceptual Framework
Black women experience multiple complex problems because they contend with the
stressful issues of race, gender, class, and other social constructs in society (Kennedy & Jenkins,
2018). These social constructs of systemic racism, economic injustices, and bigotry are central to
the literal and figurative chokehold and caste placement that Black people experience in America
(Alexander, 2010; Butler, 2017). These facts and realities shape the conceptual framework and
are supported by CRT and intersectionality theories used in this study.
Combined, these theories provide the foundational understanding of the racialized
experiences of Black people in America. They underscore how race, racism, and gender
contribute to the othering of Black people and the denial of their humanity. Consequentially, they
demonstrate how these concepts contribute to multiple forms of injustice for Black people,
among which are being subjected to abject poverty, the unjust killing of unarmed Black people,
54

and the historical lack of justice and accountability for these deaths. These deaths weigh heavily
on the physical and mental well-being of Black women as mostly they are the ones left to deal
with the impact of the deaths and to fight for justice.
For Black women, it is tantamount to fighting against the tide to stay afloat as these
social inequities, compounded with the trauma from the deaths of their relatives, anchor them
down. Despite this weight, however, Black women have been socialized to show strength,
resilience, and fortitude as well as caring for others, which is the construct of the SBW
(Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007). The construct is a race-gender schema designed by the dominant
society that prescribes images that Black women should present (Hill Collins, 2000). It means
that Black women are expected to sacrifice their own needs in all situations, have unyielding
strength, assume multiple roles, and take care of the needs of others in the moment (Beauboeuf-
Lafontant, 2007; Liao et al., 2020).
In other words, as the conceptual framework (Figure 1) depicts, Black women are
expected to keep their heads above water as if they have it all under control while
drowning/suppressing their own Black pain and trauma mostly influenced by their
intersectionality, systemic racism, and societal control. Examined through the lens of CRT and
intersectionality, these conditions magnify Black women’s victimization, making them the
invisible victims of the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives by way of the stress,
trauma, depression, and other pain they endure, which are mostly hidden beneath the surface

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Figure 1
Conceptual Framework

Summary of Review
White people’s misimaginations of Black bodies in the United States have infused with
cruelty racist ideologies that dehumanize, discredit, and destroy Black lives. This destruction of
Black bodies has been legally and morally sanctioned through chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws,
laws like Stand Your Ground and stop and frisk, and policing strategies like no-knock warrants,
racial profiling, and chokeholds. Unarmed Black people continue to be killed as a consequence
of these racist policies and practices, the impacts of which resonate throughout the Black
community. Black women, however, are arguably the group most impacted by police, vigilante,
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and racist violence against their loved ones, yet their pain and call for mental health services are
often trivialized personally and in the professional field because of the SBW trope.
Black women have been at the forefront of protecting their loved ones from these harms
while experiencing their own discrimination, racially charged hatred, fears, anger, and social
exclusion. Black women expend much energy shifting emotionally and psychologically to
prepare for the assaults their families and they have and will encounter in a society that
historically devalued and denied their existence. Much of the depression, physical, and emotional
distress Black women in America suffer results from an intersection of historical trauma,
intergenerational trauma, institutionalized trauma, and personal trauma fueled by combined
racism, sexism, and poverty. Each new incident of race-related brutality or death of a Black
American triggers past traumatic experiences that can increasingly damage Black women’s
mental health.

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Chapter Three: Methodology
Black women have endured compounded historical, intergenerational, institutionalized,
and personal trauma due to the unjust killings of their unarmed relatives (Menakem, 2017). They
are invisible victims of this race-based violence, yet there is a dearth of empirical data on the
impact on their mental health. The purpose of this study was to gather narrative data from Black
women who have lived experiences with this problem in the context of contemporary racism,
sexism, and classism. This study achieved that purpose through direct interviews with a small,
purposely chosen group of Black women to inform sustainable policy and practice changes
relative to the problem. This chapter outlines the steps taken to achieve this goal via a qualitative
study, including the study’s research questions, the data collection methods, details on how
interviews were conducted, and an outline of the interview questions. In addition, this chapter
addresses the personnel factors undertaken to ensure a successful study. The participant sample,
the researcher’s biography and positionality, and factors related to ethics, credibility,
trustworthiness, limitations, and delimitations are also included.
Research Questions
1. How do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an unarmed Black
relative understand the mental health impact of that event?
2. To what extent do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an
unarmed Black relative view subsequent responses from the law as helpful or harmful
to their mental health?
3. How do Black women experience the societal myth about Black women’s resilience
in the context of their ability to deal with the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives?

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Overview of Design
This qualitative study sought to understand the impact on Black women’s mental health
of the unjust killings of their unarmed Black relatives in America. According to Merriam and
Tisdell (2016), qualitative research uses data to uncover the meaning of a phenomenon for those
involved, how they interpret their experiences with it, their knowledge of it, and its impact on
their personal environment. For this study, data were collected through interviews in which
participants shared first-person accounts of their experiences of the killings of their unarmed
relatives. These accounts came in responses to several interview questions. Only participants
with direct experience of the situation were selected to participate, which supports the credibility
of the research. This study captured and reported multiple perspectives to identify the many
factors involved in the problem. The analysis of multiple viewpoints is consistent with the
holistic account that characterizes qualitative research (Creswell & Creswell, 2018).
Research Setting
Another key characteristic of qualitative research is collecting data at a place or in the
field where the participants experience the problem (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). To do so, I met
participants for an introductory session in the manner and place of their choosing, including
traveling to meet some in person. For some participants, the introductory sessions were done by
phone call. One participant requested to submit their responses in writing after a brief
introduction to me and the problem being researched.
The problem addressed herein is a very personal topic area that required establishing trust
and confidence in me as the researcher. Merriam and Tisdell (2016) and Patton (2015) stated that
developing the level of trust to be open and honest with the researcher, an outsider coming into
their private, insider zone is essential to participants in a qualitative study. Developing trust goes
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together with conducting the research in participants’ natural settings where they feel
comfortable (Patton, 2015). Therefore, the introductory sessions allowed the participants to
observe me, and me to observe them, to build rapport in their natural setting and place of
comfort. Thus, if they chose not to continue with the interview, they had the comfort of being in
a safe, familiar place. For those who chose to continue, the conditions were the same.
I used Zoom video meetings for the interviews and some introductions. This technology
allowed participants to be in a place that was comfortable for them, such as at home. Except for
one, all the participants interviewed with me from their homes. I was also flexible in
accommodating one participant who preferred and requested to share her story and responses to
the interview questions in writing. This delicate topic evoked a multiplicity of difficult emotions,
so I was prepared to meet the participants where they were for their comfort and well-being.
Additionally, among other postmodernist theories, CRT, which bedrocks the framework
for analyzing this study’s results, raises concerns about what Merriam and Tisdell (2016)
described as the interview interaction. These concerns include power dynamics that are a natural
part of interviews, constructing the story, and telling the story to others (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016). As Patton (2015) stated, having an in-person introduction would help to balance the
power and give participants an authentic feel about my empathic neutrality, which also helped to
build rapport, trust, and openness going into the interview.
Researcher
As a Black woman in America and the mother of two adult Black men, I find myself in
constant fear every day that the inevitable will occur: one or both of them will be unjustly killed.
This fear is no exaggeration or far reach for me as both of my sons have had encounters with the
justice system. Indeed, my older son is currently in prison, and I am well aware that his life does
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not matter in there. My younger son, mostly compliant and obedient to the law, has often found
himself the victim of mistaken identity by law enforcement personnel; he has been stopped,
frisked, followed, and detained at times. I am keenly aware that this is a bias I brought to this
research. It also fueled my assumptions that all Black women experience or should experience
these unjust killings the way I do. There was also an assumption that participants could actually
name and articulate what they were feeling or experiencing. This assumption required me to
refrain from voicing their feelings for them or giving leading prompts.
I was also concerned that my role as a political leader would influence some participants’
responses as they might have believed I had the authority to change the situation of killings by
law enforcement or that I should unilaterally take away funding from police. The intersection of
these salient characteristics—Black, female, mother, legislator, and educated—placed me as a
threat to the credibility of the research. Therefore, I had to engage in reflexivity much more to
balance the insider/outsider perspectives. Merriam and Tisdell (2016) highlighted the importance
of considering how the researcher’s insider/outsider relationship with the participants and the
topic affect the research. Insider/outsider status extended to my positionality, background, race,
class, gender, and other salient characteristics and determined how the participants responded to
me as the researcher (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). It affected how much access the participants
gave to me, what kinds of information they were willing to share, and how much.
This research required me to exist simultaneously as an insider and an outsider to the
topic and process. During the interviews, I often reflected on and detailed my interventions and
their purpose to ensure they aligned with understanding the meaning the participants held about
the issue and not the meaning that I brought to the issue. Creswell and Creswell (2018) stated
that in qualitative research, the researchers might bring personal value to the study; however,
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they must focus on and collect the participants’ meanings about the problem and “not the
meaning that the researchers bring to the research” (p. 182).
I experienced significant manifestations of this personal value and insider status after
conducting four interviews and following my analysis of them. I realized that in order for me to
accurately tell their stories, I had unconsciously internalized their stories, their pain, and their
grief. I did not plan for the impact of those stories on me because of my positionality as a Black
woman and mother in America. As addressed in one of the findings sections, my actions were
indicative of the SBW. I made sure that the participants’ needs were met for them to participate
in the interviews, but I neglected to consider my own needs and self-care. In fact, to me, my
internalization of their trauma was inexorable until my own mental health was challenged. I
became overly anxious, my anger levels were high, sleep was evasive, and I found myself crying
uncontrollably one day as I worked on analyzing the stories. For me to continue with the
interviews, I had to seek release through talking with family, friends, and a counselor. It took me
3 weeks removed from the study to regain my composure, my sense of independent self and my
neutrality as the researcher. I also used some valuable tools such as meditation and invoked my
hobbies engaging in a historic community project, and narrating part of an orchestra concert to
help ground and center me again.
After those 3 weeks, I was able to resume the interviews and analysis of the data with
clarity. Therefore, I had to be aware and self-reflect often to ensure that I was not interpreting the
data and the findings according to my biases. Lastly, although the other personal characteristics
of my positionality were important to establishing my insider status, I still needed to set clear
boundaries pre-interview regarding my role as a researcher and not one of the other identities.

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Data Sources
Data were collected through individual interviews. They were also collected from one
participant’s written responses. The interviews were conducted at times and under conditions of
each participant’s choosing that were also convenient for me. The interviews centered the
perspectives of the participants, whose narratives could be transferrable to others with shared
experiences. Each question in the interview protocol built on the others and was designed to
address the various aspects of the research problem. Interview questions are attached in
Appendix A.
Participants
For this study, the interview participants were people who identified as Black women
across the gender spectrum. They also identified as having been exposed to the experience of
having unarmed Black relatives unjustly killed within the 15 years prior to this study. For this
study, being exposed meant having been a direct witness to the killing of an unarmed Black
person, having watched the videos of that killing repeated in news coverage, having an unarmed
Black relative who was killed, or having a connection to the family of an unarmed Black person
who was killed unjustly. The term “relatives” was also broadly defined to be inclusive and was
not limited to biological relationships. This definition considered transgender women, for
example, who frequently and conceptually adopt each other as relatives for safety, protection,
and support. This practice is typical of the Black community’s culture.
A small, purposely chosen, non-random participant sample characterizes qualitative
research (Creswell & Creswell, 2018; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Five participants were
interviewed for this study, and one other provided written responses. These participants
represented mothers and other Black identifying-female relatives of unarmed Black people who
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were killed. Having participants who represented those demographics gave better credibility to
the responses because they were the people with the most information to help understand and
answer the research questions. Their selection is consistent with Creswell and Creswell's (2018)
description of the qualitative research approach as grounded in learning from the participants.
This research problem narrowed the scope of the sample to those who identified as Black women
whose relatives were killed, but it did not specify that only mothers could participate.
In a phone call, I offered a verbal invitation and followed up with a written invitation to
participate in the study to select Black women whom I knew have had unarmed Black relatives
killed. The invitation to participate in the study was also shared electronically with Black women
through select civil rights attorneys, mothers against violence groups, LGBTQ+ and transgender-
specific advocacy/support groups, and through acquaintances whom I met in professional affinity
groups for People of Color and Black women. I asked these acquaintances to share the invitation
with Black women whom they knew had relatives killed or were directly exposed to the killings.
Weiss (1995) suggested that the right sponsorship, meaning a person who knows both the
interviewer and the interviewee, would be helpful in recruiting participants. Sponsorship
increases the likelihood that someone will participate in the interview.
The invitation to participate specified the need for mothers and non-mothers and included
information about the nature of the study. I followed up via phone call with potential participants
who responded to the email invitation or through my acquaintances to ensure they met the
participant criteria. I also reiterated during the initial calls that the interviews would be
conducted via Zoom and recorded. Each selected participant was then invited to an in-person or
phone meet and greet session and a Zoom interview. Prior permission was collected from each
participant to record the interview, orally and with video. I explained to the participants that
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accurate transcription and observation required recording the interviews. Of 11 respondents, five
people declined to be recorded and did not proceed with the research.
Instrumentation
The interviews followed a semi-structured approach. According to Merriam and Tisdell
(2016), semi-structured interviews include structured and less structured questions that allow
flexibility in wording. This format offered a series of open-ended questions designed to produce
data about the problem and allowed me to respond to emerging changes or the interviewees’
views or needs. Inquiry in qualitative research should minimize the researcher seeking
predetermined responses when gathering the data (Creswell & Creswell, 2018; Patton, 2015).
Therefore, the truly open-ended questions in this research allowed the participants to respond in
their own words in sharing their views, opinions, and realities.
The research problem is a highly sensitive, personal, and experiential one. It took a
qualitative measure of how the participants experienced the unjust killing of unarmed Black
people on their mental health, how they coped with the impact, and the extent to which they
found intervention from the law helped or exacerbated the problem for them. As indicative of
qualitative inquiry, Merriam and Tisdell (2016) posited that using a semi-structured approach
would allow for follow-up, clarification, and deviation to capture the most accurate data.
For this research, 19 open-ended questions were asked with follow-up probes as needed for
clarity.
Crawford and Knight Lynn (2019), Creswell and Creswell (2018), and Patton (2015)
suggested using probes as a key part of the interview protocol to leverage additional information
or explanation for deeper context from the participants when warranted. Three questions were
introductory/rapport-building questions, and 16 were related to the research problem. The
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interview questions were all derivatives of the study’s research questions. They addressed the
research questions in sections, were direct, personal-experience-based, easily understandable,
and allowed participants to tell their stories in a manner and with as much detail as worked for
them (Krueger & Casey, 2009). Patton (2015) also described this approach as the intersection of
traditional research inquiry and phenomenological inquiry, which provided space to explore
participant thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about this sensitive topic in a deeply personal way. The
questions and interviews also allowed participants to share profound, wide-ranging emotions and
self-reflective analysis of their responses unearthed by the research questions.
Data Collection Procedures
Qualitative research collects data in the participants’ natural settings. I first met
participants in a setting that worked for them instead of bringing the participants to me or
sending them a questionnaire to complete (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). This topic area required
much time dedicated to building trust and establishing shared value in the topic, shared
experiences, and a willingness to share deep and varying emotions. I conducted the research in
two phases: an in-person or phone introduction for trust building and a follow-up session using
the Zoom virtual video-conferencing platform.
Creswell and Creswell (2018) expressed support for this approach, explaining that
researchers have face-to-face interactions that often extend over prolonged periods for this type
of study. For the interviews, the initial meeting or two were spent getting to know each
participant. I also used the time to lay out the raw topic as well as expectations for the interview,
including confidentiality and vulnerability, and I sought written permission to record the
interview. Having this initial meeting allowed respondents an opportunity to decline to be
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interviewed. I contacted them after 24 hours to determine if they wished to proceed, and we set
times for the interviews.
All of the interviews were conducted using Zoom to capture the participants’ verbal and
physical responses, but the option of a recorded phone interview was also offered. Bogdan and
Biklen (2007) and Weiss (1995) recommended recording interviews. Recording helped me
capture content and participants' reactions to the events central to the interviews (Weiss, 1995).
The literature also stated that there are nuances and complexities in participants’ speech that are
important to the research and that simple notetaking might miss (Weiss, 1995). My field notes
captured looks of physical anguish and physical expressions of fear and concern that were
relevant to the participants’ experiences. Using the video platform also allowed the participants
to bring their deceased relatives into the interview by sharing photos of them as a way of
humanizing them. The video recordings also provided a record to support my interpretation of
the data and could be available orally if my data analysis came into question (Weiss, 1995).
The interviews lasted long enough to capture quality data and included time for
emotional breaks. According to Weiss (1995), 30 minutes or less seems challenging to develop a
coherent account of the participant’s response, and an hour is a reasonable expectation for an
interview. However, for this research, I allowed extra time if the participants needed it.
Immediately prior to the interview, I again checked with participants to get verbal permission to
record and transcribe the interview. Finally, access to a professional counselor was made
available for 24 hours following the interview in the event that any participant needed to take
time to debrief or for self-care.

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Data Analysis
To process the data effectively, Merriam and Tisdell (2016) suggested creating themes or
focused areas into which to categorize responses. Creswell and Creswell (2018) further
suggested that each theme be coded using special characters, such as colors. Using these best
practices, I reviewed the video recording, transcript, and field notes within 3 days of a completed
interview and recorded my reflections. I compared the themes from each interview and
categorized them into color codes to correspond with the research questions.
I wrote the information according to the themes and noted poignant observations. In
addition, I flagged quotes that directly related to the themes. These writings formed the narrative
for the findings. According to the literature, and my experience, this simultaneous process of
data collection and analysis captured the accuracy and essence of the data in the moment. It was
less overwhelming than waiting until all the interviews were completed before beginning the
analysis (Creswell & Creswell, 2018; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Patton, 2015).
Credibility and Trustworthiness
In qualitative research, credibility and trustworthiness determine if the study measures
what it intended to measure, if the findings match reality, and if there will be consistency in the
findings should the study be replicated (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The internal and external
measures of these factors punctuate a study’s credibility and trustworthiness. To ensure research
credibility, I used the following strategies offered by Merriam and Tisdell (2016):
• Member checks/respondent validation: I brought the penultimate draft of the
interview findings to the participants and invited them to review and offer feedback
within a week to ensure I accurately captured what they intended to convey. I
emphasized to them to pay careful attention to my observation and interpretation of
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their physical reactions to ensure they were accurate. I also asked follow-up questions
of some participants for clarity and rewrote portions of the findings based on their
feedback. My narratives also included participants’ quotes to retain their voices and
perspectives instead of my interpretation.
• Researcher’s position or reflexivity: I have lived experience of this research topic.
Therefore, I spent much time clarifying my biases and assumptions to ensure that they
did not skew my interpretation of the findings. I intentionally documented my biases
as part of the narrative of the findings each time I was conscious of them being
present during the interviews and after. Additionally, I thoroughly reviewed the
interview transcripts to document how much I spoke and highlight places where my
questions were leading. I found only one instance of a leading question, but it was
immediately followed by a more open question to capture the same information.
• Adequate engagement in data collection: I spent as much time as possible with the
participants pre- and post-interview to develop a deeper understanding of the topic
from their point of view. Creswell and Creswell (2018, p. 201) posited that “the more
experience that a researcher has with participants in their settings, the more accurate
or valid will be the findings.” Having prolonged time collecting the data could also
unearth contrary or discrepant information that runs counter to the theme of the
research. I included all discrepant information in the findings to keep the research
honest and, therefore, credible. For example, although most participants shared
disrespectful and oppressive interactions with law enforcement, at least two shared
that their experiences were supportive, helpful, and well-received. I also spent much
time reviewing the videos, comparing the recordings with the transcripts, and
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developing accurately edited Word documents of the transcripts. This review was
important because the Zoom transcription program often garbled responses when the
participants’ emotions were high or when they were crying. It also helped me to
accurately capture participant quotes that supported the themes and key findings.
Ethics
The researcher-participant relationship is key to mitigating ethical dilemmas in data
collection and analysis and reporting the findings (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Transparency
about the research is essential to developing a trusting researcher-participant relationship, as is
remaining nimble and flexible because the researcher is “a guest in the private spaces” of
participants (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, p. 262). I used the 12-point “Ethical Issues Checklist”
outlined by Patton (2015, pp. 1081-1085) to help me prepare and participate fully and honestly in
the research, which also helped establish the relationship with the participants.
Stake (2010) questioned whether permission is enough to collect and share data from
participants. I considered their exposure and how far I could step into a participant’s zone of
privacy. Zones of privacy are “relative, situational,” and their boundaries can shift and change in
an hour (Stake, 2010, p. 205). To capture the most accurate evidence to inform the problem of
practice, I needed to delve deep into the participants’ experiences. Once I confirmed their
voluntary agreement to participate, I informed the participants of the confidentiality of the
process and that I would assign a pseudonym to them and their killed relatives.
I asked each participant if they wanted to change their name on the Zoom video screen to
reflect a pseudonym or if they wanted to have their names and killed relatives’ names used in the
study’s report. All but one participant wanted to have their relatives’ names revealed in the
findings and narrative write-ups. All but two of them wanted to have their real names revealed.
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Given the differences in options, I chose to adhere to what was presented to the institutional
review board (IRB) and protect the participants’ anonymity by using pseudonyms for them and
their loved ones. Participants did sign a form with their real names. This document is only
available to the participant and me.
My information sheet for exempt studies was shared with each participant to assure them
that no identifying information would be used in the analysis and report. It also shared with them
the confidentiality of the process as approved by the IRB. I fully disclosed to the participants
how the information they shared would be analyzed and reported. Also, I told them that no
compensation or other incentives were offered for participating in the study.
These steps follow what Patton (2015) outlined for the informed consent and
confidentiality stage in qualitative research. In addition, I informed participants of any risks that
might be involved in the interviews. It was imperative to address risks with participants who still
had open, unresolved cases for their relatives who were killed. Those participants were asked to
consult with legal professionals to ensure that participating in this study would not jeopardize
their open cases. I do not know if they consulted with anyone, but they made the independent
decisions to proceed with the study. I was transparent with them in outlining the benefit of this
research to me in completing my doctoral studies. Finally, in our initial meetings, I gave
participants a general sense of the questions I would ask. That is why the interview protocol
included a day of engaging with participants prior to the interviews.
Limitations and Delimitations
Limitations identify potential weaknesses of a study based on factors that the researcher
cannot control (Kornuta & Germaine, 2019). Limitations restrict the extent or type of available
data and the generalizability of findings. Examples of limitations are the number of participants
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who could be involved, the number of participants who could be interviewed in a finite amount
of time, and the participants’ honesty. For this study, the limitations are external influences such
as the media and social justice movements like Defund the Police, which can force the
respondents to feel a certain way or exaggerate the impact.
Delimitations address the choices or boundaries chosen by the researcher to narrow the
scope of the study so that it is manageable and focused (Kornuta & Germaine, 2019). Examples
of delimitations are the study’s setting, the sample size, the participants’ demographics, and the
methodology used, such as interviewing (Kornuta & Germaine, 2019). For this study, the
interview questions generalize that all Black women with the experience of the killings suffer
trauma or have deteriorating mental health. Clearly articulating and providing space for extreme
emotions was important to the interviews.

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Chapter Four: Results and Findings
Black women are the invisible victims of the unjust killing of their unarmed Black
relatives. Unarmed Black males face a disproportionate rate of being killed by police at about
four times the rate of both White and Latino males, accounting for 36% of the unarmed deaths
(Pratt-Harris et al., 2016). Of the unarmed women shot and killed by police between 2015 and
2022, 21% were Black women (Washington Post, n.d.). In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) reported that in 2015, homicide rates were 5.7 per 100,000 for the total
population and 2.6 per 100,000 for White people. However, it was 20.9 deaths per 100,000 for
Black people. This number represents about three times greater than the national average and
eight times greater than that of White people. Coupled with the inherited trauma from slavery
and the Jim Crow era, these killings harm Black Americans’ mental health (Bor et al., 2018).
This research focused on the impact on Black women left to cope and fight for justice in the
aftermath of these homicides. It contends that these Black women are dying slowly from the
racial trauma, loss, and pain they experience because of the deaths (Smith, 2018).
This chapter shares this study’s results. The data were collected and analyzed using
personal interviews in which participants shared their stories: their first-person accounts of their
experiences. Mainly, it centered the voices and experiences of the participants on the mental
health impact of these killings, their resilience, and the impact of their interaction with all levels
of the legal system in the aftermath of these killings. The following research questions guided
this study:
1. How do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an unarmed Black
relative understand the mental health impact of that event?
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2. To what extent do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an
unarmed Black relative view subsequent responses from the law as helpful or harmful
to their mental health?
3. How do Black women experience the societal myth about Black women’s resilience
in the context of their ability to deal with the unjust killing of their unarmed Black
relatives?
Sixteen open-ended questions, all derivatives of the research questions, formed the basis
for the interview protocol. They framed the inquiry as more direct, lived-experience-based,
easily understandable, and allowed participants to give their narrative descriptions. Patton (2015)
described this approach as the intersection of traditional research inquiry and phenomenological
inquiry. This approach provided space to explore participants’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
about this topic in a deeply personal and self-reflective way.
Participants
The six participants were people who identified as Black women across the gender
spectrum. They represented a small, purposely selected, non-random sample, which is
characteristic of qualitative research (Creswell & Creswell, 2018; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Among the six, 50% identified as cisgender, 16.67% agender, 16.67% non-binary, and 16.67%
undisclosed. In addition, they represented diverse income levels, diverse neighborhood identities
including rural, urban, and suburban, and three distinct geographic locations: Southeast,
Southwest, And northeast. The majority identified as being in the 40–49 age range. They had
exposed to having unarmed Black relatives unjustly killed for periods ranging from 10 months to
12 years.
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Table 1 annotates the participants’ demographic characteristics, using pseudonyms to
protect their anonymity. Being exposed meant having been a direct witness to the killing of an
unarmed Black person, watching the videos repeated in news coverage, having an unarmed
Black relative who was killed, or having a connection to the family of an unarmed Black person
who was killed unjustly. The participant sample represented mothers and other Black women-
identifying relatives. The term “relatives” was also very broadly defined, and participants did not
have to be biologically related to the deceased.

Table 1
Demographic Characteristics of Interview Participants
Participant
characteristics
Participant
A
Erma
Participant
B
Nettie
Participant
C
Tish
Participant
D
Chase
Participant
E
Wilbe
Participant
F
Honora
Age range
40–49 50–59 40–49 40–49 40–49 60+
Gender
identity
Agender Cisgender
Non-
binary
Cisgender
Prefer not
to disclose
Cisgender
Income status
Upper-
middle
income
Low-
income
Working
class
income
Working-
class
income
Upper
middle
income
Upper-
middle
income
Neighborhood
identity
Suburban Urban Rural Rural Unsure Suburban
Geographic
location
Northeast Southwest Northeast Northeast Northeast Southeast
Time exposed
to relative
being killed
1 year 2 years 10 months 12 years 4 years 10 years
Interview
length in
minutes
140 113 37 40 60
Written
responses

Note. Low-income = receives government subsidies

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Having participants who represented these demographics gave credibility to the responses
because they are the people with information-rich cases and experiences that helped with
understanding and answering the research questions by illuminating the issues centrally
important to the purpose of the study (Patton, 2002). This condition was consistent with how
Creswell and Creswell (2018) defined the qualitative research approach as grounded in learning
from the participants.
I conducted the interviews between March 12 and April 19, 2022. Five participants
engaged in the recorded interviews via Zoom. One participant asked to send written responses,
which were submitted on May 5, and followed up with a brief phone conversation to authenticate
her responses and provide space for clarification. The Zoom interviews ranged from 37 to 140
minutes (shown in Table 1). They included transcripts generated automatically by the Zoom
system, which I edited for clarity.
The flexibility of the interviews was essential because the problem addressed is sensitive,
and most participants displayed a diversity of emotions. One chose not to turn on their camera
for most of the interview. Instead, they opted to have a photograph of their son who was killed
displayed throughout the interview. Towards the end of the interview, they turned on their
camera to offer thanks for allowing them to tell their story. All participants were offered a
meeting with a licensed, professional counselor to help them debrief from the interview. Each
declined, citing that it was therapeutic to just be allowed to speak openly about their experiences
without a carefully prescribed approach to help them heal.
Data Analysis
Upon an interview’s completion, I reviewed the video recording, transcript, and my field
notes and recorded my reflections. These reflections were a first attempt to identify tentative
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themes in the participants’ narratives. I reviewed the written responses and identified themes.
The Zoom transcripts presented a challenge because they interpreted and captured participants’
speech, cadence, and accent overlayed with emotions in often garbled ways. I, therefore, spent
much time reviewing the videos and creating clearer, more accurate Word documents of the
transcripts.
Several themes surfaced and were consolidated into eight overarching and intersecting
ones (Figure 2): continuous psychological injury, anger, fear, guilt, and sadness; isolation and
dissociation; invisibility; SBW expectations and delivery; secondary harm to family and friends;
the long, complex arm of injustice through systemic oppression and racism; the good and bad of
professional support; and the two faces of tragedy: unbearable pain and joy. The colors used
represented those of the Black Diaspora: red, black, green, and gold/yellow. In that order, the
colors represented descriptive, interpretive, analytical responses, and how participants ascribed
meaning to their experiences. Figure 3 is a visual of how I categorized the major themes by code.

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Figure 2
Color Codes and Corresponding Interview Questions
Descriptive
Interview Questions

Q3a. Can you tell me about your relative and
what happened to them?
What is your relationship to them?
Q3b. What does it do for you when you have
to think about all those feelings and emotions?
Q6. In what other ways has the unjust killing
of your relative affected your life?
Q7. Can you describe your experience
interacting with law enforcement and the legal
system following the death of your relative?
Q14. What support services have you used and
to what extent have they helped you?
Q15. If you have not used any support
services, why not?
Interpretive
Interview Questions

Q10. From your experience, how are
systemic disparities perpetuating the race-
based trauma Black women experience as a
result of the unjust killing of their unarmed
relatives?
Q11. How do you think others see you and
your capacity to deal with these unjust
killings?
Q12. How have you experienced the
oppressive societal myth about being the
strong Black woman in dealing with the
unjust killing of your unarmed relative?
Analytical
Interview Questions

Q4. What is the impact on you of repeatedly
seeing the videos, hearing, or reading in the
media about unarmed Black people killed?
Q8. To what extent do you view/experience
the subsequent responses from law
enforcement or the law in general as helpful to
your mental health, if at all?
Q9. To what extent do you view/experience
the subsequent responses from law
enforcement as harmful to your mental health,
if at all?
Q13. What’s your awareness of the
availability of professional support services to
help you cope with the mental or other health
trauma you may have experienced?
Meaning Making
Interview Questions

Q5. How do you understand or experience the
mental health impact on you?
Q16. How have you experienced invisibility
in the context of the killing of your relative?
Q17. Where, when, how in your fight for
justice do you feel that you have the
opportunity to create space for your own
grieving related to the killing of your relative
and subsequent responses by authorities?
Q18. Given your experience with this death,
what structures do you need to see
transformed?
Q19. Given what you have gone through and
still live with related to this death, how did
you find joy again? What brings you joy?
What makes your heart beat better?

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Figure 3
Coded Emergent Themes

I documented the information and my observations according to these themes. I also
noted quotes that connected to the research questions. I used pseudonyms for participants’ quotes
to validate and center their lived experiences. Through this inductive process, seven key findings
emerged in the participants’ narratives and related to the major themes. These connections are
directly correlated with the centrality of experiential knowledge, one of the tenets of CRT
(Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and part of the theoretical framework used in analyzing this research.

Descriptive
- Continuous Psychological Injury, anger, fear, guilt, sadness
- Secondary harm to family and friends
Interpretive
- Strong Black Woman expectations and delivery
- Isolation and Dissociation
Analytical
-The good and bad of professional support
- The long arm of injustice through systemic oppression and
racism
Meaning-Making
-The two faces of tragedy–unbearable pain and joy
-Invisibility
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Figure 4 shows the relationship between the codes, the eight major themes, and the seven key
findings and subfindings.

Figure 4
Codebook: Relationship Between Codes, Major Themes, Key Findings and Subfindings

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Results For Research Questions
The objective of this qualitative study was to center and expose Black women’s
experiences in relation to the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives and the effect on
their mental health. In a manner that humanized their relatives, participants shared descriptive
details of their relatives, including age, height, and hobbies. They also shared information about
the circumstances of their being killed. Table 2 provides a summary of those details. The table
also reveals one general note: all of the relatives were male, and all were shot and killed. This
finding speaks to several larger societal concerns. However, for this research, it speaks to the
ulterior problem embedded in this study of the invisibility of Black women as victims of race-
based violence, both physically and mentally. With Black women being 28% of unarmed women
killed by police between 2015 to 2022 (The Washington Post, n.d.), it is not coincidental but
consequential that none of the relatives were female.

Table 2
Circumstances Surrounding Relatives’ Deaths
Participant Relative killed By whom Where Year
Erma 16-year-old son Teen friend Friend’s home 2021
Nettie 29-year-old son Adult stranger In his home 2019
Tish 33-year-old brother Adult acquaintance Outdoors 2021
Chase 29-year-old fiancé Police In his car 2010
Wilbe 16-year-old son Teen stranger Outdoors 2018
Honora 17-year-old son Adult stranger In his car 2012

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Research Question 1: How Do Black Women Who Have Experienced the Unjust Killing of
an Unarmed Black Relative Understand the Mental Health Impact of That Event?
This research question was the heart of the study. It sought to explore how participants
interpret or assign meaning to what they experience when an unarmed relative is killed. It
directly any relationships that supported the problem of the impact on Black women’s mental
health of the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America. The responses from
participants provided real-world evidence to demonstrate that the problem exists.
The common thread woven throughout this research and the participants’ responses to the
interview questions was the psychological trauma they all experienced due to the killing of their
unarmed relatives. Several of them also described corresponding physical pain and injury
associated with the trauma. The responses revealed two distinct findings: manifestations of
psychophysiological injury and finding purpose in these deaths for participants’ own survival. A
subfinding of Finding 1 that bore separating out for explanation is that of guilt and self-blame.
Similarly, I separated a subfinding of Finding 2, that participants needed release more than fixing
or healing, for its poignancy and further explanation.
Finding 1: Manifestations of Psychophysiological Injury
The main aim of this study was to understand how Black women experience the impact
on their mental health related to the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives. The
participants revealed that the impact or injury they suffered was beyond mental or psychological.
For three of the six participants, there was a distinct correlation between their mental state as it
related to the deaths of their relatives and the onset or recurrence of physical symptoms.
Empirical evidence in Chapter Two supports this finding, as such levels of emotional and
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psychological injury cause medical injury (Alang et al., 2017; Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Winters,
2020).
Snyder (2020) wrote, “Trauma in any form, can be harmful to someone’s mental health,
self-esteem and general wellbeing” (p. 60). The literature also states that PTSD is prevalent
among Black people (Himle et al., 2009). Consistent with the literature, all the participants
shared information about being clinically diagnosed with or experiencing symptoms consistent
with PTSD brought on by the extra stress after the trauma of losing their relative. These
symptoms included hypervigilance as experienced by Tish, who is very guarded about trusting
others and fearful about what could happen to her young son. Hypervigilance is also true for
Chase, who remains on edge about police interaction with her family and the expectation that
another of her relatives, particularly her son, will be unjustly shot and killed by police.
Honora and Nettie experienced dissociative reactions, which are intrusive thoughts and/or
flashbacks. These imaginations or flashbacks can be so realistic that they are unbearable and
almost impossible to detach from (Snyder, 2020). Emotional triggering contributes to most of the
other symptoms of PTSD for the participants. All participants have experienced emotional
triggering as they see media coverage of killings of other unarmed Black people and children
murdered in numerous school shootings. Another symptom, avoidance, was prevalent. All but
one participant purposely avoided friends, family, and other social gatherings where they could
potentially and easily be reminded or forced into recalling their relatives’ deaths. Table 3
provides a brief look at Nettie’s and Honora’s accounting of the manifestations of
psychophysiological impact on their lives after their sons’ deaths.

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Table 3
Summary of Nettie’s and Honora’s Account of Psychophysiological Impact
Participant Psychophysiological
symptoms
Participants’ quotes
Nettie Dissociative reactions,
emotional triggering,
isolation, cognitive
dissonance
I now have depression.
And insomnia. Like, I don’t want to go to sleep
because I’m dreaming about it and about not
always waking up.
Oh, it affected my health definitely. There was a
period of time I wasn’t eating, and I got
hospitalized for that.
I’ve become a loner. … I don’t really go out and do
anything, honestly. I haven’t since my son passed.
I just do the things that I have to do for my
survival.
I’m in this broken, like, limbo space mentally,
physically, emotionally. Like, it takes over my
body, almost like another entity.

Honora Emotional triggering,
dissociative reactions,
flashbacks
It’s painful to relive over and over again, especially
how he died.
I hear of kids being shot. I imagine the moment
when [the shooter] was unloading his gun on my
child.
I think about Jai in those moments. What was he
thinking? What was he feeling?
I think how terrifying it must have been for Jai to be
shot at in such a vicious way—and not just three
bullets, ten—by a man who was really just trying
to murder him.
Every single day, there’s another murder of a young
Black man. It’s just really been all over again and
again for me.
I understand that my emotional psychological health
needs rest. And because I have had cancer, I have
to take my emotional state of mind and care of my
physical body very seriously.

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Further analysis of the participants’ responses provided direct, substantive evidence of
their psychophysiological impact, as detailed next. To put it in the proper context, I also provided
in this analysis brief demographic information about the relatives who were killed and the
circumstances surrounding their deaths. This information was provided by the participants and is
represented in Table 2.
Of all the interviews, Erma’s was the most evidentiary of Finding 1, filled with raw,
unfiltered emotions and pain. Erma’s son was 16 years old when he was shot and killed at a
friend’s house on the day of Erma’s birthday. She noted that she would never celebrate her
birthday again. The interview lasted approximately three hours, with several breaks to contain
high emotions. Erma cried throughout the interview. In my field notes, I documented my
observation that she was in mental anguish, evidenced not only by her crying but also by the fact
that she repeated some version of the statement, “my son is dead, not here,” more than 40 times
during the interview. She said, “It has affected my life, too. I can’t even sometimes explain it.
You have fears for your other children. You have fear for yourself.”
From the beginning of the interview, Erma’s description of her symptoms and actions
was clear: “I feel defeated.” She said, “I am angry not having my favorite, my favorite male in
the whole world not here and for no reason. For my son to not be here is unbelievable.” Erma
asked for her son’s picture to be up as her video image throughout the interview and for his name
to be used. She wanted to humanize her son and not have him seen as a victim but as the tall,
well-mannered, intelligent, loving child who “stayed in the house or in school. He wasn’t in the
streets … never picked up a gun nor had any experience with a gun.” She stated that when she
learned about her son being killed, “I was and still am trying to focus on staying alive.” She said,
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“My love for him will take me out. I thought that was really going down.” This sentiment of
wanting to die was one that Erma wove in various forms throughout the interview.
Erma shared that on the day of his death and until the time of the interview, she could not
physically and mentally talk to the detectives investigating her son’s death. Other family
members have helped her deal with them. In addition, she felt that the interaction with law
enforcement personnel was painful and far less than ideal. In recalling the day of her son’s
funeral, Erma shared a very personal and profound story about her mental state:
If somebody would have told me on February 13 that my son would be dead on February
15, I would have already told you that I would have died also. In some ways, I have.
Three days before my son’s funeral, I wrote a letter to my best friend because she knows
everything, everything about me. So, I wrote to her because for me to see him, to see my
son in the casket, I didn’t think I was going to live after that. I really thought that I was
going to die. So, I wanted to make sure that everything was in order for my daughters.
She also talked about frequently going to her son’s grave to see her child. The subliminal
message of wanting to die in her statement, “I want to be where my child is at, so that’s why I go
there so frequently,” could not be missed.
About 2 hours into the interview, Erma offered a more vivid accounting of her
psychophysiological symptoms. She said,
To get out of bed most times, I really feel like I have something come out of me, walk
around, and kick me in my back to get up out of the bed. That’s how hard it is sometimes
just to get out of bed.
She followed this by sharing that she is angry and in pain when she opens her eyes in the
morning and that she still has to go through this anguish “a whole nother day.” Erma also shared
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how painful it was to do a simple thing like her hair: “I haven’t done my hair. I can’t even tell
you the last time I did my hair because it hurts.”
Similar to Erma, Participant Nettie lost her son. He was her only child, and, in 2019, he
was shot and killed in his own home at around 1:30 am by an individual, or individuals, looking
for someone else. She shared her battle with depression and insomnia following her son’s death.
She, too, shared that getting through each day is a challenge:
I don’t want to go to sleep because I’m dreaming about it. It’s so weird, like about 1:30 in
the morning. It’s just like every night at that time, I can be asleep, I’m gonna wake up.
And it’s just the constant thought, like I regret closing my eyes. I try to go to sleep to try
not to think about it, and I regret waking up because it is another day that I’m going to
have to try to get through.
She also described the impact on her physical health. Her grief and anger were all-
consuming that there was a period when she stopped eating and had to be hospitalized. Nettie
disclosed that she was neglecting her physical health because “why try” she said, “some days
you get up and some days you just can’t.” She talked about having several back surgeries and six
hand surgeries in a short period: “just things that are just like falling apart because me, physical
health-wise, I was neglecting to take care of myself.” This seemingly unconscious, self-
destructive behavior is consistent with isolation, shutdown, and cognitive dissonance, as
described by Alang et al. (2017) and Bryant-Davis et al. (2017).
“I’m emotional all the time,” Nettie said, through tears, recalling that she and her son
were best friends who spoke to each other every day for 29 years, and “just like that, you know, I
realized that he was gone.” Several times throughout the interview, Nettie referred to being
“broken” physically, mentally, and emotionally and being “angry, angry, angry.”
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Days after his 16th birthday, Wilbe’s unarmed son was randomly shot and killed by a
young man while he was shopping. Wilbe summed up the impact on her as an indescribable
feeling of pain and roller coaster-like emotions. The constant incidents of children being shot and
killed bring more hurt and trauma to her, she said. Like Nettie, Wilbe spoke of being depressed
and struggling with sleep, which affected her physically. “I can’t sleep,” she said, “I haven’t
gotten a good night’s sleep in almost 4 years.” She also spoke of her physical exhaustion:
“People ask me how I am, and I just think, just tired, tired. Just tired.”
Chase’s unarmed fiancé was shot and killed by police. Chase spoke of her deep
depression and that she was diagnosed with PTSD. She shared that the physical symptoms of
anxiety showed up fully whenever she encountered police officers in the first few years after her
fiancé’s death. She described an anxiety episode that happened when she was at work: “I was at
a job in a doctor’s office, and a police officer came in for an appointment, and I had a full-blown
anxiety attack and had to leave work.” She quit working at the doctor’s office.
Tish’s brother was trying to visit a friend when someone he knew and trusted shot and
killed him. Her brother was an out gay man, and his sexual orientation was a major reason for his
murder, stated Tish. She described her brother as well-known and well-loved by everyone in the
community. Since the perpetrator was someone her brother knew and trusted, Tish described her
new struggles with trusting anyone or the law enforcement system. She also described
experiencing a new level of anxiety as she worries about protecting her young Black son.
For Tish, the emotional triggering happens each time she sees a video in the media of a
Black man purposefully killed. She thinks of the video of her brother being shot and killed.
Through tears, she recalled, “My brother was shot in the back, and he fell. As he was struggling
to get up to get away, the person, the murderer, came up to my brother and point-blank shot him
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in the head.” With noticeable emotional pain as her body and voice shook, Tish continued, “So,
he wanted my brother dead, and he did it in a manner where he was sure my brother wouldn’t
survive, … and I just don’t know what kind of anger that guy had for my brother. Why?”
Finally, although Honora, who submitted written responses, did not connect her cancer
recurrence with the unjust murder of her unarmed son, she emphasized the importance of taking
care of her emotional and psychological health and her physical body. Honora’s only child was
shot and killed in a public space by someone whose bigotry drove him to conclude that her 17-
year-old child was in his White space and engaging in actions he did not approve of, which the
perpetrator claimed posed a threat to his life and safety. When her son was little, Honora was
diagnosed with breast cancer. She was again diagnosed with it after his death. However, again,
she did not correlate that second diagnosis with any psychophysiological injury resulting from
his death.
Honora and Wilbe described their symptoms of PTSD when having to relive how their
sons died. For Honora, each time she talks about it or sees news about other unarmed Black
people killed or children killed in mass school shootings, it is emotionally triggering. It jump-
starts her imagination to the moment the shooter unloaded his gun on her child. She thinks about
her son in that moment, wondering what he was thinking or feeling and how terrified he must
have been to be shot in such a way. Like Tish, she thinks about the gunman trying to murder him
and unloading “not just three bullets, 10” into her son, which is painful to imagine and relive, she
stated.
For Wilbe, every day is a struggle filled with emotional triggering. She said, “It could be
anything, another child being shot, or I see a child in the age range and wonder. I wonder what
he would have been doing now.” She explained that the children in her neighborhood love to ride
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their bicycles, and she always wonders if her son would still be that child on one.
“Automatically,” she said, “when I hear about children being murdered, I am triggered, and my
next thought are their mothers.” As I observed her eyes well up with tears and her body tense up,
she explained, “I feel my own pain, and I hurt for the mothers because it’s a feeling that you
wouldn’t want to wish on anybody. So, I automatically hurt for the families.”
Historically, Black women have concentrated their energies on mothering the race
(Daniel Barnes, 2016). They teach their children coping strategies to get along in order to survive
(James, 1997). In other words, according to Daniel Barnes (2016), they feel responsible for
protecting the Black community and a sense of failure when things do not go well. Things not
going well could include the killing of unarmed relatives. As already established, this
responsibility continues to be a source of emotional and psychological strain that directly affects
Black women’s health.
This subfinding of guilt and self-blame surfaced mostly in responses to Interview
Question 4, which asked about the impact of repeatedly seeing the videos, hearing, or reading in
the media about unarmed Black people killed. Most of the participants expressed some guilt and
self-blame for not doing enough to protect their relatives from being killed. For example, Erma
blamed herself for letting her son go to a sleepover at a house she did not personally examine.
This statement must be put in context to understand its significance. Prior to her son’s murder,
Erma never let her children sleep over at anyone’s house. Erma did not even let her children ride
the bus to school; she would drop them off and pick them up. Erma felt that when her son
reached age 16, she could “loosen up the reigns and allow [him] to stay over at his school
friend’s house.” Although she did not meet the parents, she understood from her son and what
she knew of the parents that they were a good family. “In my mind,” she said, “I thought it was
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an okay household because the mother is there, the father is there, and the son is the only child
left in the household.”
Erma stated that she is so protective of her family that her son did not think that she was
going to allow him to sleep over “because of the way of the world. I’m very protective of him.
That was one of my stresses that that wouldn’t happen to my son, and now it happened to my
son.” She dropped her son off at the front door of his friend’s house. In describing these actions,
Erma cried much because, as she stated, she felt like she had delivered her son to his death. The
imagery of this scenario repeatedly plays in Erma’s head, causing her to experience prolonged
trauma and PTSD.
Tish was very direct about her feelings of guilt and shame. In response to Q4, Tish
described her anger and daily struggle with self-blame. She said, “I struggle with it every day
because I feel like what could I have done to prevent it? I blame myself in some ways.” Three
times during the interview, Tish spoke of blaming herself and not protecting her brother. She
stated, “I just in my heart, I just feel somehow to blame because it was my little brother, and I
felt like I failed him, and I didn’t protect him like I should. So, I struggle with that.”
In her written response, Honora spoke of how seriously she took her role as a mother to
raise and protect her child. She also alluded to her fear and insinuated guilt at not being there to
protect him from being killed:
I worked as hard as I could to shield him from anything that would hurt or harm him. To
relive the fact that the very thing that I tried to protect him from happened hurts. We did
everything right. There’s a fear and a sense of failure you have as a parent when you
aren’t there to protect your child—and we weren’t there. I struggle with that every single
day, especially when there’s another murder of a young Black man.
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Finding 2: Black Women Find Purpose in These Deaths for Their Own Survival
Turning tragedy into an opportunity for good or change is not a new concept for Black
women. It is also not unusual for Black women to try to protect and humanize their children even
in their death, as was done by Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin (Yancy & Jones, 2013)
and many of the participants in this study.
Honora turned her tragedy into a call for action. Like Mamie Till, Honora shared in her
written response that she made a deliberate choice not to become disengaged but to encourage
others to get engaged to stop the senseless gun violence. She felt that for the sake of her son’s
legacy and the work that God has given her to do, she had to take what happened to him and
“channel it in a way that can really make a difference for others.” She said that she knew that if
she did not make that choice, there would have been a second death, hers:
This is a tragedy that always stays with me. There’s not a day that goes by—a minute that
goes by—that I don’t wish I had my son with me, but I think that I have made a choice.
I’ve made a choice to take this tragedy and to do something for the good of my
community, of the nation, so that people don’t have to experience what I’ve experienced
and live through it.
Honora has been very vocal about sharing the story of her son’s murder throughout the
country. She has spent much time asking community leaders and elected leaders at all levels of
government, especially Congress, to enact common sense gun laws to prevent such violence. It
overwhelms her every time she sees, reads about, or hears in the media about another unarmed
Black person killed. “It grieves me,” she said. “I get angry about that, and it angers me that
people are willing to let people die.” She sees her call to action and finding new meaning and
purpose in her tragedy as an obligation she must bear:
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I feel like that is a burden that I bear. That is a burden that every gun violence survivor
and victim bears. I have to pray a great deal. I know that in this country, if we ever
stopped caring about people, if we ever stop caring about the numbers of people dying in
our country and who we are, we’ve lost our humanity.
Like Honora, Wilbe keeps her son’s name and death relevant to the changes in social
behaviors and policies she would like to see implemented. Although it saddens her, she shared
that she enjoys talking about her son and probably does so every day. She started a foundation
and opened a store in his name. It is difficult for her because she would rather be alone but doing
these things gave her a sense of purpose, she said. Wilbe stated that she was not active in the
community’s fight against violence until it landed at her door. To deal with her grief, she
immerses herself in projects like the foundation. In speaking about dealing with her grief and
trauma, she stated,
I go through the motions, but when I get there, I’m afraid that I’m going to get stuck
there, so I switch gears. Like, once I feel myself getting sad, I’ll start working on another
project. I have to keep going. Yeah, I can’t be still too long because I’m afraid of what
that’s gonna look like.
Wilbe described her son as a scholar-athlete, loving, well-mannered, honor-achiever who
enjoyed sports, bicycles, and science. The foundation, she said, keeps his name and legacy alive
by giving young people an opportunity to have a voice in the efforts to stop gun violence. The
young people earn prizes like bicycles, something her son loved. They can also earn scholarships
for their education or participation in athletic activities to motivate many of them to change the
negative trajectory of their lives.
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Erma constantly used words like “unbelievably painful,” “draining,” “frustrating,”
“depressing,” “disheartening,” and “broken” to describe her daily life following the death of her
son, but she took her tragedy and channeled some of the bad energy into something meaningful.
Along with a friend who suffered the loss of two children, they began a Facebook support group
for women who experienced the tragic loss of a loved one. She also alluded to having her own
business for people who grieve behind the scenes. The latter, she felt, helps to support the people
who have to immediately pick up the pieces of their lives and head back to work and normal
activities, smiling on the outside but crying on the inside. In making this decision, Erma drew on
her experience of being asked within a month of her son’s death when she would return to work,
a level of invisibility and disregard for the trauma she experienced.
Many of the participants expressed it was important for them to have a platform or a
space to just “be myself and get my cry out,” according to Erma. For them, family, friends, and
even counselors can get in the way of trying to do this as a way to process and find meaning in
their loss and grief.
Erma described the feeling as no greater loss and therapy as a good outlet if they let you
“only talk about your child and leave it.” However, she stated that most therapists push for
expressions of feelings surrounding a child’s death and life. Family, friends, and counselors even
share messages and thoughts such as, “Your son is an angel now in the clouds with God,” stated
Erma, “but I don’t want to hear that old generation words or sayings. Don’t nobody want to hear
your old folks’ tales.” Forgiveness is another of the prescribed tenets that Erma feels that family,
friends, and therapists describe healing, but she rejects it. She emphatically stated, “As long as
my name is what it is, as long as I am a Black woman, until the day I die, I will never ever
forgive him for killing my son.”
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Chase felt that the therapy she received was good, but much of it was spent helping her
deal with her trauma so that she could, in turn, help her child. She said it was difficult being in a
small town because her story didn’t get the national attention and recognition it needed:
It’s crazy that I see after it happened, more and more, things on TV exactly the same or
very similar to my situation. And that could have been me on TV telling my story, telling
them how the police harass us, how they killed him. That would have been more healing
and better for me than any of the therapy and counseling I have been going through. I
needed to let it out, so thank you for thinking about me, including me, and letting me do
it here. Honestly, it’s the first time in 12 years that I feel lighter about his murder. And
that’s a word I couldn’t even say.
Wilbe shared that she realized there are many more therapists available. However, she
claimed, “a lot of the times the mothers get assigned to speak with people who can’t relate, and
it’s really textbook therapy,” which she found was not helpful. Wilbe found better help in a grief
group she joined called Moms Bonded by Grief. She described it as a support group for mothers
who lost their children to violence. She said, “We help each other out a lot because we all
experienced the same thing.”
One salient point Wilbe offered is that sometimes they have a therapist who comes to the
group, but the therapist is a Black woman who also lost her child. Wilbe said this group has
worked for her to deal with her loss, grief, and trauma. However, she is looking into having some
one-on-one, intimate face-to-face professional counseling at some point.
When it comes to grief groups, Erma had some mixed feelings. She felt that they could
provide good space for release but often have an element of prescription that can cause more
pain. To begin with, no one wants to be on it. Then you have to mentally prepare yourself to log
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on, and while you are on until the time you are off, you are still in so much pain—physical pain,
mental pain. Erma recognized that though not ideal, it was an option for release, not healing. “If
someone gives me a space to talk about my son, it is still so painful for me, but this is a part of
me now,” she said. She shared that she is trying to find different outlets, “knowing that they are
not going to magically heal me or because I will never be healed.”
Tish received the best support to deal with the loss of her brother from her coworkers.
She explained that they gave her support and space whenever she needed to talk about it, not
when they wanted to, and would plan leisure or recreational activities to give her another outlet.
She also emphasized that she has a therapist who is White but who has been helpful because the
therapist is in a mixed-race marriage and has Black children. Tish stated that although the
therapist “doesn’t get it all the way,” she understands much about the struggles of Black people,
keeps it real with Tish, and can relate to the fear of losing an unarmed Black relative because of
her children. Tish has young children and finds this alignment with her therapist important in
helping her to process her fears for her children and her brother’s death as opposed to helping her
“get over it” or “move on.”
Nettie said she sought the help of a therapist because “there’s no way to deal with the
pain. But all they can give you is like tools to get through, not heal, because it’s so different
when it’s your child.” She credits some of the tools she gained from therapy in helping her to
feel joy at the mention of her son’s name. However, she pointed out that she can only go to a
certain level in therapy. “I just try not to get too deep,” she said, “I’m never going to get over it,
and I don’t want to work on healing or my grieving when there’s no closure, no justice as yet.”
Nettie also mentioned that she is a part of a support group called Moms of Murdered
Children. Although she feels like the group is not the best fit for her, like many of the people she
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met in the group, she stays in it because it is an outlet that stops them from taking justice into
their own hands. “My grief is different from theirs,” she said, “because a lot of their cases have
been solved. I told the group every day I wake up, it’s like the same day because nothing’s
happened. You know, there’s no justice.”
Summary of Findings for Research Question 1
In reference to having an unarmed relative killed, Erma stated, “This is a group
membership that nobody wants.” This statement also summed up the qualifying sentiments of all
the participants about the mental, physical, and social pain they experienced following the loss of
their relatives. The latter aligns with Research Question 1, which sought to explore how Black
women experience and interpret the effect on their mental health following the unjust killing of
their unarmed Black relatives.
The data revealed two distinct findings: manifestations of psychophysiological injury and
that the participants find purpose in these deaths for their own survival. Guilt and self-blame
were a subfinding of Finding 1. Similarly, a subfinding of Finding 2 was that participants need
release more than fixing or healing. These were subfindings because they were not responses to
specific interview protocol questions; however, more than 50% of the participants shared
substantial information about them, which merited their amplification.
In Chapter Two, I recounted the actions of Mamie Till, mother of Emmitt Till (Baker,
2006; Till-Mobley & Benson, 2003). Despite pressure from the authorities not to display his
body and an attempt to bury him before she arrived to identify him, Mamie Till wanted to tell her
story by opening his casket and displaying her son’s disfigured face and body (Baker, 2006).
This was Mamie’s call to action for everyone to see the manifestations of racism and take
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ownership in fighting to end racism and the unjust killing of Black people, Black children
(Baker, 2006; Till-Mobley & Benson, 2003).
Sixty-seven years later, many of the participants in this study have done the same thing.
These findings revealed that they assigned a greater purpose to the deaths of their relatives,
which helped with their survival of the tragedies. They have and are telling their stories in unique
ways to maintain their relatives’ legacies and call others to action to change what is happening in
society that caused these deaths. Their actions included starting a foundation in their relative’s
name as Wilbe did or community organizing to advocate for gun violence legislation, as Honora
did. These are also ways for the participants to release their anxieties or depression associated
with the deaths.
Overall, the findings supported the premise that Black women’s mental health is
impacted by the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives. All participants expressed
experiencing symptoms consistent with PTSD. These symptoms included emotional triggering,
hypervigilance, dissociative reactions or flashbacks, and avoidance, which often leads to
isolation (Snyder, 2020). The data also revealed that all participants have engaged in protective
actions to help themselves cope or find release from the extra stress and trauma brought on by
the killings. These protective actions included supportive influences, which meant they sought
support from family, friends, or support groups. Another action they have taken is learning
coping skills through professional therapy, which they apply whenever needed to reduce anxiety
surrounding the traumatic event.

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Research Question 2: To What Extent Do Black Women Who Have Experienced the
Unjust Killing of an Unarmed Black Relative View Subsequent Responses From the Law
As Helpful or Harmful to Their Mental Health?
Interview Questions 8 and 9 were designed to explore secondary layers of race-based
trauma Black women experienced as they interacted with the law and how they interpreted those
interactions. They asked about the extent to which participants viewed or experienced law
enforcement responses as helpful or harmful to their mental health. Their experiences with these
interactions varied widely and were fluid over time along a spectrum of worse to good. One
participant’s relative was killed by the police, while other citizens killed the others. Regardless,
there was an adequate intersection in their experiences in both helpful and harmful ways from
which two findings emerged: justice is limited and the participants’ intersectional identities
compound the mental trauma they experience interacting with the law.
Finding 1: Justice Is Limited
“It’s not enough justice won because I don’t have my son, and two, because there’s so
many other people in this country that continue to die like him,” wrote Honora. This position is
not unlike the one shared by all participants, some of whom have had the perpetrators prosecuted
and others who have not. Honora shared how mentally challenging it was for her to go through
the trial. For her, the experience of Trayvon Martin’s family and their inability to receive justice
was central to her thinking as she went through the trial of her son’s murderer. The defendant
was invoking Stand Your Ground laws for his defense, similar to the defendant in Trayvon
Martin’s case. That defense and the fact that the trial was happening in Florida, exacerbated the
mental trauma she experienced daily.
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Florida has had the most liberal Stand Your Ground laws which, among other tenets, says
a person can stand their ground wherever they are, use deadly force if they fear for their lives,
and have the protection of the law (Johnson et al., 2015; Munasib et al., 2018; Randolph, 2014).
With this as her backdrop, Honora described her experience with this part of the legal system as,
perhaps, the most challenging:
We were going to be in trial in an environment that may not support justice for my son.
In the courtroom, we couldn’t speak. The only thing I was allowed to do is sit, sit with
my pain and listen as the case went on.
Tish was so used to the legal system not serving justice for Black people that she
honestly thought her brother’s murderer would “get away with it.” She is convinced that it was
the outpouring of anger from the community that helped push the police to arrest her brother’s
murderer. The murderer, she claimed, is a privileged White man with connections to people in
high offices, “so he really thought that he was untouchable and could get away with it.” To that
end, she felt that he was undercharged. “He should have been charged with first-degree murder,”
she stated, “but he was not.” She said this angers her and her family, and it has been a “long and
agonizing wait” trying to get answers from the district attorney’s office regarding that charge
when there is a preponderance of evidence and eyewitnesses.
Chase’s response to the related interview questions was most direct: “I don’t have faith in
our justice system and those who are supposed to protect us.” She described her interaction with
the law from the day her fiancé was shot and years after as one of mental torture, intimidation,
and fear. She stated that she does not feel safe interacting with law enforcement. Not only was
the officer not brought to justice for killing her unarmed fiancé, but she and her family began to
suffer what she described as intimidation by police officers.
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I was kind of harassed for no reason at all. Out of my whole life, I never got pulled over
for jaywalking. I never got stopped for jaywalking, and then a couple months after he was
killed, no not even a couple months, I would say a couple weeks after, I got stopped, me
and a friend for jaywalking. Police seem to find me a lot now when I’m driving. I got
pulled over a couple of times. My family and friends got pulled over multiple times when
we’ve never had issues like that.
In addition, Chase went described being questioned about the whereabouts of her
10-year-old son after the arson at the house of the officer who shot her relative. She felt that the
police were trying to blame her and her family for the arson. The harassment did not stop, and 2
years later, Chase’s older son, a well-respected teenage student-athlete, and his close friend were
followed by an off-duty officer who drew his gun on them, forced them to the ground, and
handcuffed them without probable cause. Chase felt strongly that the harassment and
intimidation began because she and her family were looking into filing a wrongful death lawsuit
for the unjust murder of her unarmed fiancé. For her, there has been no support from the law, no
justice, and she feels they have been “extremely” harmful to her mental health.
For Erma, no amount of justice will bring her son back, but she was not expecting that
the person who killed her son, though a teenager himself, would only get 6 months of probation
and ankle monitoring. “He might have been 16,” she said, “but he knew guns kill.” She felt that
the parents had connections in the justice system because the father worked under law
enforcement as security at a high-profile government agency and that this factored into the
outcome of the case. There was not any sense of justice for her, not even limited.
Congruent with Yancy and Jones’s (2013) finding that Black males, in particular, are
further dehumanized, criminalized, and blamed for their demise following their deaths, Erma
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stated that one of the first things the detectives told her was that her “son was the cause of his
own death, even though he was shot in the back of the head.” Plus, she added, the shooter knew
enough to clean the gun and attempt to flush the bullets before calling his mother, not the
paramedics. “The killing might not have been intentional, but his actions afterwards were,” said
Erma. In her fight for justice, she felt the meetings were fruitless because everyone seemed to be
falling in line with what the defense attorney wanted. This included the state’s attorney, who
kept telling her for a full year that “there’s nothing that we can do.”
Erma said the defense attorney laughed at her in court when she asked for the defendant
to be removed from the community, something they had agreed to with the state’s attorney. It
was unbelievable, she said, because it was clear that they had already agreed to something of
which she was not aware. When she spoke out about the injustice, the state’s attorney tried to
silence her, telling her that she could not talk about the case because it involved juveniles. Erma
pushed back, saying she was prepared to go to jail:
What is the penalty for me talking about it? What is the jail time because I’m going to
talk about it. I’m going to talk about it. You can’t tell me I can’t talk about my son.
That’s crazy. You can’t tell me that. You were supposed to get justice for my son. My
son is dead, not home healing from a gunshot in his foot.
Erma also felt that another layer of injustice was that no action was brought against the
father of the young man who killed her son. According to her, the father needed to be charged
because he is equally culpable. It was his gun, and he did not secure it, so his son had easy access
to it. “There’s some undercover stuff that happened,” she said, “because I know that any other
case, the child and the father would have been charged.” Erma shared with all the legal
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professionals that they would not be able to understand unless a situation like hers happened to
them. She felt that if that happened, they would see the importance of doing their jobs correctly.
Nettie still has no closure for her case. However, she described her experience with law
enforcement as “disrespectful and layered trauma.” She shared that law enforcement officers
have been harmful to her mental health because no one would talk to her. In response to Q8 and
Q9, Nettie stated, “To be totally honest, it’s been horrible as no one police officer ever called me,
to this day. I was his only parent. They never talked to me.” She shared that when she called
angry that she had not heard from them, “they literally cussed me out.”
Almost 3 years since her son was murdered, Nettie feels that there will never be closure
or justice for him. She feels they did not prioritize his case from the outset because they did not
know her son and assigned stereotypes to him as a young Black man. She related that from the
time law enforcement arrived on the scene until her interview, they disregarded the family’s
wishes. Most painful to Nettie was the police trying not to release his body so that the family
could have a proper and timely burial of him.
The particulars of participants’ interaction with the law, whether with police officers or
the court system, bore challenges to their mental health. Regardless of the adjudication status of
their cases (Table 4), each felt that any justice they receive on behalf of their killed relative is
limited as nothing will bring their relatives back to life. In addition, they felt that because unjust
killings of unarmed Black people continue to happen frequently, the systemic injustices of
privilege, poverty, and racism continue. To that end, they shared that their sense of justice for
themselves and their killed relatives is and will continue to be limited.

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Table 4
Adjudication Status of Participant Cases
Participant Relative killed Adjudication status Year
Erma 16-year-old son Conviction, probation 2022
Nettie 29-year-old son Open, unresolved --
Tish 33-year-old brother Indictment, pending trial 2022
Chase 29-year-old fiancé No arrest or conviction, closed 2010
Wilbe 16-year-old son Conviction, prison 2019
Honora 17-year-old son Conviction, prison 2014

Wilbe’s recollection of the trial for her son’s killer punctuated the intersection of
systemic oppression and a sense of limited justice that all the participants experienced:
He was a product of his environment. Before he shot my son, he was shot in a drive-by,
yes. So, he was a product of his unfair environment. If somebody would have took the
time out to care for them the way he needed, I might still have my son. Resources need to
change. There’s not a lot of resources in those communities for our children. He didn’t
have a chance. He dropped out of school in eighth grade. He didn’t have a chance. He
said he did not know my son; he never saw him before. He was not trying to shoot him.
He was trying to shoot the young man that he was with. During the trial his family got up
and spoke on his behalf and said that we come from a place where it’s kill or be killed
and when she said that, it clicked. That’s when I realized he didn’t have a chance. This is
the way he was raised.

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Finding 2: Black Women ’s Intersectional Identities Compound the Mental Trauma They
Experience Interacting With the Law
Crenshaw (1989) first introduced the theory of intersectionality. The theory described the
compounding effect marginalized and minoritized people experience when their individual
subordinate identities of race, class, gender, and other marginalized identities intersect
(Crenshaw, 1989). Several of the study participants were dealing with the trauma of losing a
loved one and the compounding factors of disrespect and disregard related to their aggregate
identities, further intensifying their traumatic experiences. Erma and Nettie described how dual
and triple subordinate identities determined the success of their interactions in their fight for
justice and even their grieving.
Nettie described that the investigators would only talk to her son’s biological father, who
had never been in his life. Her son met his father, she said, the year that her son died at age 29.
She and her attorney went to the law enforcement unit after they would not speak with her on the
phone. In the presence of her attorney, she said, “They cussed me out and told me they didn’t
have to tell me shit, and they were talking to [him], which is his biological father.” Nettie added
that she was the only one always there for her son, and “they said they didn’t have to tell me shit
because they were dealing with his dad who didn’t even know his birthday. They had to call and
ask me for his birthday.”
Nettie said the experience was very traumatic for her. She has a lifetime order of
protection against her son’s biological father, and because the investigators chose to deal with
him, she could not get access to any information about the investigation of her only son’s
murder. Basically, she felt that she was being told to be silent, stay in her place, and let the
“men” handle it:
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This man did not have to prove himself before they would talk to him. When they saw the
last name, they, of course, they know him. He’s been downtown many times. He has
many records. That was the link that they connected him to my son. They didn’t know
who DJ was. They just thought he was involved in drugs and all this stuff. But I was the
loud Black woman who had to prove myself. I was upset the deputy won’t give me any
information, so I was angry, I was cussing, I was angry. I’m not even gonna lie about
that. And then they told me to bring my ass over there, and they hung up on me. My
lawyer told me not to go over there: “They want to arrest you.” But I took my papers to
show that I always had sole custody. … It is like my opinion doesn’t matter, and that’s a
real hard part. You know, I said DJ would be shifting in his grave to know that they are
calling on his biological father for anything, you know.
Erma’s experience had some similarities to Nettie’s. She described her experience
with the state’s attorney, who was representing her son, as horrible. “Basically, basically what
they told me was you don’t have no say, and what you need to do is seek counseling.”
Having worked in a section of the law enforcement system for 20 years, Erma tried to
explain why their proposal for punishment would not work and why it did not represent justice
for her son. Instead, she felt she was told to be silent and stay out of the matter. She wished she
had the financial resources to hire a lawyer because the outcome would have been different.
What was most frustrating, she said, was that they “act like what I was saying that I pulled it out
my tail.”
Erma also shared that apart from the SBW syndrome, there was her experience with the
“woman’s work” expectations. For instance, she shared that she did not get a break even with
family. If she was crying and highly emotional about her son’s death, family members would tell
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her to get herself together and, in the same sentence, ask, “what I was cooking tonight. … They
expect you to just keep taking care of all the domestic stuff as if only a woman can do, you
know, take care of everything.”
Lastly, Erma alluded to her socioeconomic status as a subordinate identity compounding
her grief and trauma. She said that she was so heartbroken, angry, and in pain at the loss of her
son that “if I had the money, I wouldn’t have returned back to work.” However, she
acknowledged that although she thought about quitting, she knew that because of her other
children, she could not be “grieving and homeless. … I still gotta be here for my other, you
know, two daughters and make sure they have what they need.”
Chase and Tish also shared that they felt ignored and disregarded because they were
Black women and too emotional in the situations. Chase described sitting in the hospital's
waiting room for 4 hours before they allowed her to see her fiancé, who, as she described, “laid
dying in the back” while she waited. “Maybe,” she said, “if we were allowed to go to him right
away, he might have lived having us family around him, showing him love, and hearing our
voices.”
Tish said she immediately tried to tell law enforcement who killed her brother: “I knew
who murdered my brother before the police did, but they won’t talk or listen to me.” She added,
My mother and I did know who murdered my brother, but we were ignored, and the
murderer was allowed to be out in the streets for months. And my brother was on the
phone with my mom, which makes it worse because she witnessed the gunshots. My
mom said my brother was like, “Oh, shoot, mom, somebody coming with a gun. I see
somebody with a gun,” and he said, “Mom, it’s [the shooter,] and he shot me.”
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She felt that because the man who murdered her brother was well-connected in the community,
her mother’s and her fear, trauma, and concerns were not taken seriously at first. She also felt
that the video footage showing the man shooting her brother and the community's outrage were
the reasons they were finally listened to, and the murderer was arrested.
Summary of Findings for Research Question 2
State- and society-sanctioned racial violence, profiling, and inequities have
disproportionately impacted Black people. With legal and social tools such as Stand Your
Ground laws, fear-fragility-induced shootings by law enforcement, poverty, or the accessibility
to guns, especially in marginalized communities, the participants felt that killing of unarmed
Black people is now somewhat of a spectator sport. Research Question 2 was designed to explore
how Black women internalize these experiences and the vulnerabilities they are forced to
navigate as they engage in justice and the law. Analysis of the data exposed two key findings:
justice is limited and the participants’ intersectionality compound the mental trauma they
experience.
The findings revealed that for all the participants, it was hard to feel any justice when
almost daily, a similar transgression of another unarmed Black person unjustly killed is broadcast
in their communities or national media. Wilbe, for instance, shared that her experience with law
enforcement was good. They prioritized her case and made an arrest and indictment quickly. She
felt some degree of justice when her son’s killer was tried and sentenced. However, that feeling
was soon diminished when a friend of her son’s, who testified at her son’s trial, was shot and
killed for testifying and cooperating with law enforcement on another investigation.
All the participants expressed that for them, justice would be having their loved ones
alive and with them. Erma was clear that for her, there will never be justice or forgiveness, and
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Nettie, because there has been no arrest in her case, can only hope for justice. Most of them felt
that justice would remain limited unless something changed about the community violence they
all experienced, the lack of resources in heavily minoritized communities, and the enactment of
sensible gun laws. Further, the participants’ experience of a limited sense of justice was layered
by what several of them described as disrespectful and further oppressive treatment, which they
attributed to being Black women. Several shared the experience of having their voices and cries
for justice ignored by law enforcement and policymakers. For some, the additional lack of
financial resources further compounded the marginalization they experienced in seeking justice.
Already in a state of pain and trauma from losing their relatives, these Black women, who
are essentially fighting for their own lives, were shamed, invalidated, and dismissed as too
sensitive, always triggered, or just hurt. (Wade, 2020) Instead of being taken seriously, they were
often told by those upholding the law to seek counseling and denied access to information that
could minimize their anxiety.
Research Question 3: How Do Black Women Experience the Societal Myth About Black
Wom e n ’s Resilience in the Context of Their Ability to Deal With the Unjust Killing of
Their Unarmed Relatives?
The interview data help explain how the participants ascribed meaning and responsibility
to their role in dealing with the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives. In particular, the
data analysis revealed three findings: the spillover effect on others multiplies the impacts on the
participants, the invisibility the feel triggers a cycle of isolation and repeat trauma, and
expectations of outward strength magnify internalized trauma.

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Finding 1: The Spillover Effect on Others Multiplies the Impacts on Black Women Whose
Relatives Were Killed
All the participants emphasized that the deaths of their relatives impacted their family life
in multiple ways. This spillover created layers of pain and trauma for others, and the participants
had to help them manage in the moment and for years. This finding is consistent with the
conclusions of Bor et al. (2018) that these deaths are harming the mental health of the wider
Black community, even those not directly connected to the shootings. For this study, the
participants defined family members as immediate, extended family and friends, unborn
children, and even pets.
Nettie spoke of the support she had to give to her son’s pregnant fiancée, who was there
with him and witnessed his death. She spoke of the PTSD and flashbacks his fiancée experiences
as she recalled performing CPR on him for about an hour, begging for help and relief while law
enforcement personnel stood around claiming to be securing the crime scene. Nettie also wanted
to highlight that not only were humans affected, but close pets were as well. Her son’s fiancée
reported that his pet dog, “a big, vibrant, protector pit bull,” was found lying on top of her son
after he was shot. The dog was traumatized, she said, compounded by the fact that he was left in
the house for 3 days with no food or water because law enforcement would not allow them to
take him from the crime scene. Nettie said the dog “is all nervous. … To this day, he is skittish.
Like, he’s a big pit bull. … He does not like new people. … He runs and hides. Scared.” This
spillover effect, she claimed, is very much like we suffer as humans, and as such, the pets need
care, too.
Chase was 6 months pregnant when police shot and killed her unarmed fiancé. Two
weeks before he was killed, they learned they were having a baby boy. In speaking about their
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son, Chase shared that he has been in counseling for anger, and she learned from trying to help
him and herself that “what I went through while he was in utero impacted his mental stability to
this day.” She clarified that she was diagnosed with PTSD due to the killing and that the severity
of the impact she dealt with mentally carried over to their baby in utero.
Her other children, whom her fiancé accepted as his own, also suffered the spillover
effect. Her oldest son, she claimed, developed “anger issues and is hypervigilant to police
presence.” Her daughter has anxiety. For Chase, dealing with her fiancé’s death was difficult.
However, dealing with the spillover effect on her family “is worse.” She said, “I cry a lot when
I’m trying to figure out how to help my son, my children, because I can’t help my son if I can’t
help myself.” Another key spillover effect that she emphasized was the social effect of having
her Black son grow up without a father. Nettie echoed similar concerns about her grandson,
although she felt that the family would do everything to make sure he truly knows who his father
was. For Chase, the context is different, as she stated, “I don’t think that my son would be going
through the troubles that he has if he had his dad.”
Wilbe spoke of the effect on her mother’s mental health and physical well-being. She
shared that her mother was so grief-stricken and heartbroken after his death that “her health went
completely down. She had to have major transplant surgery.” When asked as a follow-up how
she was handling these subsidiary layers of personal and familial impact, Wilbe responded, “I
feel much older than I really am now.” This feeling is indicative of feeling overburdened with
caring for the needs of others suffering from the spillover effect of her son’s murder.
Erma shared that as the only boy on either side of the family, her son’s death affected
others because they loved him. She made a point of sharing that she was not the only one
affected:
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What people don’t know, and obviously the killers don’t care, but it’s not only me that
goes through this, goes through the trauma. It’s the siblings, it’s the cousins, it’s the
grandparents. Every day is different. Every moment, every second, things hit differently
in the mental landscape for myself, the siblings who are scared, and others. You’re not
only hurting me.
Finding 1 revealed a common thread among the participants that taking care of the needs
of others impacted by the death of their relative became primary for them. All participants
described how the killings directly impacted others and other aspects of their lives. This spillover
effect of trauma and physical and psychological damage to others is real and demands their
attention whether they want it or not, compounding their grieving and healing process. “It’s the
two faces we have,” stated Erma. She meant a face that is smiling and one that is crying, but she
tries to suppress her emotions around her other children because they are emotional, too, and
need her to support and comfort them. They do not want to see her cry, and she does not want to
see them cry. As she put it, “then everybody’s walking around like zombies, you know, because,
you know, everybody is sad.”
Finding 2: The Invisibility Black Women Feel Triggers a Cycle of Isolation and Repeat
Trauma
About feelings of invisibility following the death of their relatives, the participants
discussed becoming closed and stand-offish, having anxiety about being out in public, staying
home, not wanting to do anything or socialize, and being just another Black woman grieving for
her child. Five of the six participants spoke of isolating themselves due to fear and depression
and avoiding public interactions that bring up their relative’s death, which cause them to relive
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the trauma. Most wished others would see them as themselves and not the new identities given to
them as the person whose relative was killed.
Contemporary society places These projections and reactions by others on Black women
as their responsibility to handle with strength and compassion, without regard to their pain or
suffering (Wade ,2020). In other words, Black women in these situations are expected to have
compassion, power, and strength for others while neglecting their grief. Honora, who submitted
written responses, offered a different experience with invisibility. She felt that in the beginning,
she experienced this invisibility in the sense that there was an insinuation that her son was in the
wrong. She felt like America saw her as another Black woman grieving for her child, and maybe
her child had been doing something wrong or illegal. She fought that invisibility, not as much for
herself but her son. She wanted people to see that she was a good person and that her son had a
family, was raised in the church, and that “he was cherished.”
Honora channeled her experience of losing her only child to get this country to see that
children like her son are no longer safe from gun violence. However, she admitted that each time
she spoke of her son’s death, it was painful as she imagined what it was like for him in those
moments. Reliving the fact that what she tried to protect her son from happened and to know that
another young Black man is murdered every day is difficult. That is the invisibility she
encounters and fights to have her voice, her trauma, her tragedy, and her son’s death matter and
for her to be heard for change and not ignored.
Tish stated that when people in public see her, “they immediately associate me with my
brother’s death. … It’s impacted me going out in the community.” She noted that she used to be
an upbeat, outgoing person, but since his death, “I stay home instead.” This self-inflicted
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isolation was also triggered by new fear and distrust of others. For Tish, her brother was shot and
killed by someone he knew, unprovoked. So, she wonders whom she can trust.
Similarly, Wilbe described her invisibility as an identity shift. She became the woman
who lost her son. She stated that even her friends see her through a different lens. To them, “I’m
not just Wilbe. I’m Wilbe, who lost her son.” This level of invisibility impacted Wilbe so much
that she was unsure of whom she was anymore: “I’m having a hard time trying to realize who I
am at this point,” she stated. Wilbe’s way of avoiding the invisibility and loss of identity was to
isolate herself. She stated several times that she did not want to do anything. She does not
socialize, and in her words, “I don’t want to be around a lot of people, even my friends.” Nettie
shared similar feelings. She described herself as becoming a loner. She stopped working; she
seldom leaves the house except for the bare necessities. She, too, does not want to be around
family and friends because her son’s death is all they want to talk about, and it is hard for her and
heightens her depression. Like Wilbe, the other participants, in their isolation, begin to think of
more ways to not encounter conversations about their dead relatives. These thoughts reflect their
efforts to stop the constant reliving of their relatives’ deaths and the trauma they experienced.
However, isolation opens their wounds and adds a secondary layer of trauma in the form of self-
blame. Three of the five participants resorted to self-blame for the deaths of their relatives.
Overall, this finding revealed that the participants described the invisibility they
experienced more as a loss of their own identity and the birth of a new identity as the person who
lost a relative. This invisibility pushed them into isolation. From this isolation emerged
additional layers of trauma as they sit with thoughts of self-blame and new feelings of fear and
distrust.
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Finding 3: Expectations of Outward Strength Magnify the Internalized Trauma Black Women
Experience
As a carryover from the days of slavery, Black women feel the need and are often
inherently compelled to make sacrifices to protect their families, their community, and their race,
often at great, unacknowledged risk to their mental and physical health (Kelly & Greene, 2010;
Williams, 2008). Black women mask these risks and continue to pass for normal while hiding
their pain and needs (Evans et al., 2017; Williams, 2008). The latter statement is true for all the
participants in this study.
They all shared concerns about not having people see them as weak or vulnerable or
having to be strong and not disengage. Chase shared that she holds her pain in: “I keep it
together. … I do outside, but at home, I’m a hot mess.” Tish convinced herself that as the oldest
sibling, she had to stay strong. She could not let people know that she is hurting and has
nightmares. Wilbe shared that she began a foundation for her son and does many activities to
honor him, so people say she is strong. Honora hearkened back to her upbringing of having a
responsibility to work on behalf of community. With this instilled value leading her thoughts, she
channeled the tragedy of the murder of her son into a burden she has to bear to make a difference
to protect others and the community:
I know that there are others and family members that have quietly gone into solitude, still
continuing to mourn. I understand that, but I think a lot of my emotional and
psychological ability to be able to take what has happened with Jai and channel it in a
way that can really make a difference for others has to do with my upbringing.
Honora’s responses to the questions about personal mental health impact and her capacity as a
Black woman to deal with the murder of her unarmed son mirrored each other:
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I feel like I carry a huge burden on my shoulders as a mother who’s lost her own child
and as someone who has just refused to stand by and let it continue to happen. It is a huge
burden because every day, I know that there are more people dying.
Honora described the burden as one that weighs on her psyche and simultaneously
empowers her to national action. She acknowledged that others have commented on how strong
and courageous she is, having lost her son yet fighting at the highest levels of government for
change. She said she felt a need to live up to the lineage of strength in the face of suffering she
saw her parents experience and that the ancestors experienced through slavery. What she
revealed about this outward strength was that inside, “It’s painful. It’s overwhelming. … I have
to pray a great deal. … All these years, I have prayed.”
This finding revealed that the internal shifting that the participants do to show external
strength and cater to everyone’s needs often desensitizes them to their own trauma and pain.
They mute their own raging internalized trauma for fear of letting others down or showing
vulnerability. For some, however, it is done to maintain self-efficacy and centeredness to keep up
the fight for justice for their killed relatives or to protect others from having the same experience.
Their efforts connect to findings and related literature for RQ1 that Black women have been
assigned the role of protector-in-chief for the Black community. Table 5 shares highlights of the
participants’ responses to the question of their capacity to deal with the killings, uncovering the
SBW schema in these situations.

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Table 5
Internalized Trauma Versus Outward Strength: Highlights of Participants’ Responses to Q11
Q11. How do you think others see you and your capacity to deal with the killing of your
relative?
Chase They think that I’m strong. They think that I’m handling the situation good.
I have a strong head on my shoulders, and I don’t spin out of control. That’s
because I hold it in.
Tish People couldn’t believe how well I held it together. In my head, I kept thinking I
have to be the strong one.
I just don’t want people to think I’m vulnerable. I don’t know why people would
think that if I let my hurt and emotions show, but that’s how I feel.
People don’t know that I have nightmares. People don’t know that I cry and
scream and blame myself. I don’t let that show.
Wilbe They see me as a strong woman.
Everybody I talk to thinks that I’m so strong that I’m doing so well, and that’s
because that’s what I show the world.
Inside, I’m crumbling every day. I feel like my insides are screaming, but I can’t
let it out.
Honora So many people have said to me, “Oh, you’re so strong, and you’re so
courageous. I don’t know if I could ever have done what you did.”
I don’t ever want to be at the point where I say I can’t handle it.
I know that there would be almost another death—of myself—if I was balling up
into a corner and not being able to move forward, and I won’t let that happen.

Summary of Findings for Research Question 3
Research Question 3 examined the construct of the SBW syndrome in relation to Black
women’s experience of the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives. Three key and
interrelated findings emerged: the spillover effect on others multiplies the impacts on the Black
women whose relatives were killed; the invisibility Black women feel triggers a cycle of
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isolation and repeat trauma, and expectations of outward strength magnify the internalized
trauma Black women experience.
As reviewed in Chapter Two, the literature in the larger fields of research about Black
women’s mental health, racism-related trauma, and intersectionality supports these findings.
Pieterse et al. (2013) posited that Black women are particularly vulnerable to racism-related
trauma because of the intersection of their subordinate identities of gender and race and other
social factors. They also noted that Black women are most likely to internalize their emotions to
deal with the racism associated with traumatic experiences due to the myth of unshakability
(Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003; Pieterse et al., 2013).
The three findings for this research question were closely interrelated. For all
participants, the way they responded to the issues that characterized Finding 1 directly correlated
to Finding 2 or Finding 3 and vice versa. For example, Wilbe’s determination to be the SBW and
not show vulnerability in public after her son was killed led to her self-isolation to not be
identified by his death or feel forced to talk about it. This isolation and suppression of the trauma
she experienced spilled over to affect her marriage, and the reverse is true. As the researcher, I
submit that more targeted work needs to be done to surface and amplify the collective efficacy to
deal with the struggles Black women experience with intersectional trauma. Instead, we rely on
the societal myths and historic labels as presented by these findings to be the coping
mechanisms.
Summary of Results and Findings
This chapter provided an in-depth analysis of the data gathered from interviews
conducted with five participants and written responses provided by one participant to the
interview questions. The data gathered was intended to uncover how this specific, purposely
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chosen group experienced the mental health impact related to the unjust killing of their unarmed
Black relatives. The sample represented those who identified as Black women across the gender
spectrum and who experienced having an unarmed Black relative unjustly killed within the 15
years prior to this study.
Eight themes surfaced from the data analysis and were clustered into four main coded
categories of descriptive, interpretive, analytical, and meaning making (Figure 2). Further
iterative analysis of the themes and textual evidence revealed seven key findings and two
subfindings that headlined the participants’ lived experiences in the context of the research
questions. Table 6 presents a visual of the key findings and subfindings in correlation with the
research questions.

Table 6
Summary of Key Findings: Unjust Killings Impact Black Women’s Mental Health
Research Question 1 Research Question 2 Research Question 3
Key Finding 1 Manifestations of
psychophysiological
injury
Subfinding: Guilt and
self-blame
Justice is limited The spillover effect on
others multiplies the
impacts on the Black
women whose
relatives were killed
Key Finding 2 Black women find
purpose in these deaths
for their own survival
Subfinding: Black
women need release
more than fixing or
healing
Black women’s
intersectional
identities compound
the mental trauma
they experience
interacting with the
law
The invisibility Black
women feel triggers a
cycle of isolation and
repeat trauma
Key Finding 3 Expectations of outward
strength magnify the
internalized trauma
Black women experience

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As a qualitative study, the interviews were administered on Zoom electronic platform
using a semi-structured interview protocol. This method provided the best tools for obtaining
authentic, personal narratives of the participants’ experiences. It offered insights into their
thoughts, reactions, and understanding of the meaning they derived from all connected
experiences as they dealt with the murders of their unarmed relatives.
The participants’ narratives highlighted their pain, anger, trauma, psychological anguish,
physical health damage, and fear associated with the experience. They also revealed the
compounding effects of racism, intersectional identities, and intergenerational injustices in
creating layered levels of trauma for the participants resulting in PTSD for each of them. For
Black women who experienced the unjust killing of an unarmed Black relative, there is an
existential loss of self-identity and corresponding isolation/dissociation. This loss is countered
with societal and historical expectations of the strong Black woman showing up and taking care
of everyone and everything, at the expense of her own care, in the face of her tragedy.
This push-pull phenomenon continues a sentiment shared by the participants: Black
women are the invisible victims of race-related trauma associated with the killing of their
unarmed Black relatives. The findings revealed significant psychological, physical, and
emotional impact felt by gender-variant Black women resulting from experiencing the unjust
killing of their unarmed Black relatives.

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Chapter Five: Recommendations
This study explored the problem that Black women’s mental health is impacted by the
unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America. The trauma brought on by the killings
has historically been and still is dangerous to the health and well-being of Black women (Smith,
2018). The purpose of this study is to add to the knowledge base about the short and long-term
mental health effects on Black women brought on by these killings. Qualitative interviews were
used to explore the experiences of those directly impacted and left to grieve and deal with the
legal system and the related racism, many of whom are dying slowly from the racial trauma, loss,
and pain they experience (Smith, 2018). The following research questions guided this study in
centering the experiences of Black women across various gender identities:
1. How do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an unarmed Black
relative understand the mental health impact of that event?
2. To what extent do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an
unarmed Black relative view subsequent responses from the law as helpful or harmful
to their mental health?
3. How do Black women experience the societal myth about Black women’s resilience
in the context of their ability to deal with the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives?
This chapter provides a discussion of the study’s findings based on the data analysis
and recommendations to support the findings. The recommendations will be measured against
the theoretical frameworks underlining this study and supported by empirical literature. The
chapter concludes with limitations and delimitations of the study and suggestions for future
research.

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Discussion of Findings
Qualitative analysis is not straight forward numbers or frequency graphs. “It seeks to
unpack how people construct the world around them, what they are doing or what is happening
to them in terms that are meaningful and that offer rich insight” (Gibbs, 2018, p. 12). It is a
careful analysis and interpretation of data and the alignment of that data with the meaning
participants intended to convey (Gibbs, 2018; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The integrity of
qualitative research relies on the researcher’s accuracy of interpretation and representation of the
data through themes, codes, and direct quotes from the participant interviews to support the
themes and interpretations. It is also important to review data for clarity and with an ear for
redundancies, similarities, and outliers to support findings or refute them.
Gibbs (2018) submitted that the researcher is central to the research, either in terms of
their presence or their experience with the study topic and the reflexivity they bring to the role.
As this study’s researcher, I am a Black woman with the experience of having my Black sons
targeted, both having guns drawn on them, my experience with law enforcement tainted, and the
weight of systemic racism on my shoulders. I found it hard to divorce myself from the pain and
anger the participants shared. My neutrality was often challenged.
I had to engage in reflexivity much more to balance the insider/outsider perspectives
(Gibbs, 2018; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Patton, 2015). I reflected on and took mental and
written notations about my interventions and their purpose during the interviews. Doing so was
particularly important when I asked follow-up questions to ensure they were not leading to the
meaning that I brought to the issue and ensure they elicited the meaning that the participants
held. In addition, to challenge any biases or assumptions I might have brought to the study, the
participant sample was purposely chosen to include more than just Black mothers. This helped to
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neutralize any preconceived interpretations I might have brought to the analysis. It also helped to
maintain the integrity of the research process.
Although this study’s results are not intended to be generalizable, the research confirmed
that unjust killings of unarmed Black people are a source of continuous psychological anguish
for Black women, particularly those with familial connections. The diminishing of their Black
woman personhood, invisibility to their pain and trauma, and expectations to cope are overlayed
by their intersectional identities and racism. The austerity of their experiences with the problem
being researched is illuminated in the findings, which correlate with the theoretical framework
and literature. The application of CRT (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017;
Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) guided the data analysis and
findings to answer the three research questions.
Research Question 1: How Do Black Women Who Have Experienced the Unjust Killing of
an Unarmed Black Relative Understand the Mental Health Impact of That Event?
Overall, the findings supported the premise that unjust killings harm Black women’s
mental health. The data revealed that all participants expressed experiencing symptoms
consistent with PTSD. In addition, several of them associated the onset of physical ailments with
the trauma they experienced. In a society wrought by systemic racism that made being Black an
ontological crime, a crime of just being (Bey, 2016; Torres et al., 2017), Black mental health is
always compromised (Winters, 2020).
Economic and social power imbalance and race-related violence are perpetuated against
Black people, harming all aspects of their lives (Carter, 2007). This is the lived experience that
CRT centers and that is also centered in this study by the participants’ narratives. As this study
focused on the experiences of Black women, it is almost automatic that the theory of
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intersectionality also overlays this study. According to Crenshaw (1991), there is no examining
of the effects of race-related violence on Black women through the lens of CRT without
understanding the role of intersectionality in affecting Black womanhood.
Finding 1: Manifestations of Psychophysiological Injury
“African Americans are 20% more likely to develop mental health issues than the general
population” (Snyder, 2020, p. 18). The system of racial, social, and economic injustice has done
what it was designed to do: keep Black people in a docile, powerless, and oppressed state.
According to CRT, this is the endemic racist premise: anti-Blackness (Crenshaw et al., 1995).
The unjust killing of unarmed Black people is symptomatic of this premise, as Black people are
seen as dispensable. Coupled with their intersectionality with other forms of subordination, as
presented by CRT (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), the higher level of race-based stress and mental
trauma Black people experience is real (Carter, 2007).
Given these conditions, it is almost inevitable that the participants experience
psychological and physical pain due to socio-judicial systems in the aftermath of the killing of
their unarmed relatives. Herman (2015) noted that “psychological trauma is an affliction of the
powerless” (p. 34). We have already established that systemic racism renders Black people
powerless. This study’s participants all described a sense of powerlessness in protecting their
relatives from being unjustly killed or, similarly, their relatives felt powerless as they were shot
by someone with White supremacy ideation or caught in the community violence cycle of kill or
be killed. Regardless of who initiates or performs it, violence produces trauma and severe stress
within a community (Hawkins, 2021).
All participants shared about experiencing PTSD symptoms or being diagnosed with
PTSD following the killing of their unarmed relatives. These symptoms include emotional
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triggering, hypervigilance, dissociative reactions or flashbacks, and avoidance (Snyder, 2020).
Emotional triggering, for instance, is constant as they are exposed to the seemingly relentless
videos and reports of unarmed Black people being killed in America. In addition, four
participants reported developing physical ailments from the severe stress of dealing with their
relative’s death. These included mild illnesses such as migraines, severe involuntary weight loss,
and back pain requiring major surgery.
Carter (2007) concluded that centuries of enduring racism left Black people physically
and mentally vulnerable. Racism is a traumatic stressor. For the study participants, the centrality
of their and their relatives’ ongoing experience with real or perceived threats associated with the
color of their skin “leads to greater internalized stress, which in turn leads to physiological and
psychological illnesses” (Winters, 2020, p. 79).
Finding 2: Black Women Find Purpose in These Deaths for Their Own Survival
People move through the emotional stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining,
acceptance, and depression (Kübler-Ross, 2003). All the study participants are caught between
anger, acceptance, and depression, which propelled several of them to want to die following the
deaths of their loved ones. In America, Black women’s experience with the intersectionality of
race and womanhood seems to propel them towards death while they fight their way back to life
(Wade, 2020). Such was the case of the participants for whom the legacy of oppression across
various social structures impacts their social identities and, therefore, their relationships with
themselves. This is especially poignant when they are most vulnerable after losing their loved
ones and affects their abilities to manage their grief on a daily basis (Wade, 2020).
The participants shared the experience of restricting this access to self and being lost
about their identities while dealing with grief and trauma. Anger emerged at the experience of
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both losses, particularly those in power who consciously or unconsciously uphold racist and
sexist practices. At this anger stage of grief, most participants were clear about not wanting to
stay there and internalizing their own self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy or failure (Jones &
Shorter-Gooden, 2003). Additionally, they did not want to remain in that space and risk the
shame or disparagement of being cast as the ABW. Black women are often misrecognized by
this oppressive stereotype, a label they will try to avoid (Wade, 2020; Williams, 2008). In doing
so, there are two paths they can take: be silent and desensitized in their grief or anger, which can
cause more psychiatric harm (Klonoff et al., 1999; Williams, 2008), or find a way to cope.
The latter of the two options put Black women in a familiar place of shifting. Shifting is
all the ways Black women respond to and cope with discrimination and mistreatment across
racial, gender, and all identity lines (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). It is in the way they think
of these situations differently, from all angles, the meaning they extract from the situations, and
the expectations they set for themselves in dealing with them. For all the study participants,
extracting meaning and finding a higher purpose in their tragedies helped them survive the
misogyny, bigotry, and psychological trauma they faced. As Honora stated, losing her son is
emotionally draining while simultaneously making her driven. Per Jones and Shorter-Gooden,
(2003),
When people are dealing with race- or gender-based hatred and mistreatment, cognitive
processes often help them to manage and overcome feelings of sadness, anger, betrayal,
or anxiety that are all certain to arise … Cognitive processes often help people to manage
their feelings about a stressful situation, and are especially useful when the person cannot
change it [the situation]. (pp. 65–66)
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Given that the study participants could not change the situation, they employed common
shifting strategies to cope. Mostly, they sought spiritual and emotional support, which helped
them to find that higher purpose, in tandem with the strategy of fighting back (Jones & Shorter-
Gooden, 2003). They were essentially working to overturn the discrimination and disrespect they
experienced and to overturn the racism and social injustices at the root cause of their unarmed
relatives being killed. For most participants, this shifting provided a space for the self-directed
release of anger and stress, acceptance that their relatives are gone and, therefore, mattered for
their long-term survival.
Research Question 2: To What Extent Do Black Women Who Have Experienced the
Unjust Killing of an Unarmed Black Relative View Subsequent Responses From the Law as
Helpful or Harmful to Their Mental Health?
Interacting with the law at all levels was stressful and added another layer of trauma, as
four participants experienced. Mostly, they felt they were not treated fairly or shown empathy or
respect as grieving mothers and relatives. For three of them, the bodies of their killed relatives
were left lying in public places for hours, similar to Black bodies left hanging from trees after
lynchings. They were not allowed access to their relatives’ bodies until well after the killing
occurred. Two of them knew that their relatives were still alive and felt nothing was done to try
to save their lives. As characterized by the participants, all of these actions and missteps were
intentional devaluing of Black humanity.
Nettie spoke about her son’s body being dragged by law enforcement from inside his
home, where he was shot and placed on a snowbank outside the home: “He was struggling to
breathe, and his fiancée was doing CPR, but the first responders won’t help her, and when the
ambulance pulled up they put him in there and turn the light off, and they stood around talking.”
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She questioned why he was not taken to a hospital but to a fire station, where his body was kept
for several more hours. “This is the kind of treatment, the racism that Black people get treated all
the time that you don’t hear about or see on the TV,” she said, “because it’s a small town, but it’s
still wrong.” Nettie summed up this experience as, “I don’t know, but it’s just very, very, very
disturbing like I would not want that to happen to somebody’s dog if it got ran over.”
The prominence of modern technology and social media have shed light on the number of
unarmed Black people killed by police. Anti-Black violence is contemporary but also historical,
having carried forward through generations since the institution of slavery (Curtis et al., 2021;
DeGruy, 2005). Per DeGruy (2021),
The vitriolic violence against black people is well documented, whether carried out by
slave patrols, members of the KKK, police officers, or average white citizens, black lives
still don’t seem to matter; even the young ones are unable to escape harm (p. 86).
Bigotry on all planes fuels this level of violence and disregard for Black humanity. After
all, since America as we know it today began, the constitution valued a Black life at a fraction of
the value of a White life and only so much as it benefitted the slave owners in the southern states
(Crump, 2019). Therefore, CRT and intersectionality apply here in underscoring the experiences
of Black women trying to find justice after their relatives are unjustly killed.
Finding 1: Justice Is Limited
Generally, the study participants expressed a lack of trust and confidence in the criminal
justice system. Nettie spoke of being verbally abused, “cussed out,” by the law enforcement
personnel investigating her son’s murder and threatened with being arrested if she contacted
them further. Chase spoke of the harassment and intimidation she, her friends, and her family
endured from the police for years as they fought for justice for their relative, who was shot and
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killed by police. Erma discovered that the parents of her son’s killer had ties to the police, so she
did not expect any significant accountability despite her plea and understanding that a stiffer
penalty was possible. Despite having a family member identified as a key witness and video
evidence, Tish felt that the police in her community endangered her family’s life by allowing the
murderer of her unarmed relative to walk free for more than 6 months. Wilbe and Honora felt
that law enforcement did all that they could do to quickly catch the killers of their relatives, and
the disposal of the cases was swift with appropriate punishments. However, they both expressed
fear and intimidation about navigating a system not meant to protect Black people. They both
spoke of the systemic racial disparities for communities of color and “the racial disparities that
are disproportionately focused on young men of color who are suffering from violence at higher
rates than anyone else,” stated Honora.
As they spoke of these experiences, all participants had the same lingering and seemingly
unanswerable question about where and to whom they could turn for help seeking justice for
their loved ones. This question is especially meaningful when the people sworn to serve, protect,
and uphold the rule of law account for a significant number of killings of unarmed Black people
and the lack of accountability. The Washington Post established a database that tracks records of
every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since January 1,
2015. This database showed that police shot and killed 143 unarmed Black people over 7 years
(The Washington Post, n.d.). In 2021, police killed 203 Black people, both armed and unarmed
(Rahman, 2021).
Additionally, convictions for police officers who kill Black people are rare, which calls
into question the legal/court system. For instance, between 2015 and 2021, police killed 135
unarmed Black people. Only 13 of the officers involved were charged with murder, and of those,
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only two were convicted (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). Seven officers were charged with the
lesser count of manslaughter, and only two were convicted (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). That
means that officers walked free in 97% to 98% of the cases, and families received no justice.
Juries are more inclined to believe that police officers who kill unarmed Black people
feared for their lives or made a mistake and reached for the wrong weapon (Equal Justice
Initiative, 2017). In contrast, Black victims are presumed and presented as dangerous,
aggressive, and inherently criminal, which activates the internal biases of jurors, making it more
likely that defendants who kill unarmed Black people will be acquitted or never charged (“Black
lives discounted,” 2021). These assumptions, stereotypes, racial imagery, and subsequent actions
maintain the racist legacy of White supremacy (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017; Chaney &
Robertson, 2015).
This literature supports most of the participants’ feelings that justice is limited. For
instance, Erma shared she temporarily gave up fighting when she reflected on the experience of
Trayvon Martin’s mother:
Yeah, sometimes because there’s nothing that can be done. Like no one held accountable.
It’s like when I look at Trayvon Martin’s mother. Her son was innocent as well, like my
son. And that man shot her son and for there to be no justice, for him to, you know, have
no consequence, no nothing because his parents was wrapped up as part of the justice
system. Trayvon’s mother was in the world, got the world marched with her and
everything, and it’s still no justice. It’s years now for her son, and no one knows if she
will ever see something, quote unquote, that will look like justice.
Regardless of whether police or other citizens killed their relatives, the participants all
dealt with police operating in a system designed to dehumanize and criminalize Black people.
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Most of the participants reported that the police assumed criminal activity by their relatives. That
is the first level of implicit bias they had to manage in seeking justice. Two participants detailed
that they experienced police treating the murder of their relatives as N.H.I. (Butler, 2017). This is
a term police use in homicide or other crime incidents where Black people are the victims and
perpetrators, the so-called Black-on-Black crime. Generally, this term is used in inner cities with
a high density of minoritized residents who often live in poverty (Butler, 2017).
Participants also had to fight against societal misrepresentation of their relatives and their
roles in their own demise. They found the same was true with police directly blaming their
relatives for their own deaths. This racist ideology goes back to slavery, where enslaved Blacks
were blamed for the punishments they received and given even more severe punishments. Weld
(1839/2013) shared the testimony of a pastor who visited a plantation in Mississippi in 1837 and
spoke about what he saw.
I saw a negro with an iron band around his head, locked behind with a padlock. In the
front, where it passed his mouth, there was a projection inward of an inch and a half,
which entered his mouth. The overseer told me, he was so addicted to running away, it
did not do any good to whip him for it. He said he kept his gag constantly on him, and
intended to do so as long as he was on the plantation so that, if he ran away, he could not
eat, and would starve to death. (Weld, 1839/2013, p. 181).
Essentially, this overseer was saying that if the slave did not run away, he would not receive that
punishment. It was his fault for bringing harm to himself.
The participants in this study are figuratively starving to death for justice for their killed
relatives. Some had literally stopped eating. At least half of them described a void about nothing
being done: no charges, undercharged, inadequate accountability, and perpetrators walking free.
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They collectively attributed this to society’s and law enforcement’s devaluing of Black life as
“just another nigger dead,” as Nettie stated.
For the participants, there is no escape from the centrality of race and racism in
witnessing unarmed Black people killed every day. The constant challenge they endure of
humanizing their loved ones and removing the dominant stigma that casts them as threats and
criminals is overwhelming to them. Even when they remove that stigma, as stated before, many
of them saw no or inadequate accountability for the killers of their relatives. Also, the
participants’ lived experiences of navigating these oppressive spaces through discomfort, fear,
and pain in order to be heard cannot be ignored.
Chase and Tish spoke expressively about if and when the disproportionate and frequent
killing of Black people will end. Chase shared that her mental health was impacted as she
watched in horror, disbelief, and powerlessness as George Floyd died under the knee of officer
Derek Chauvin in broad daylight. “Immediately, I got saddened,” she said, “and reminded of
what I went through, and then I’m angry, and I’m disappointed that it’s still happening.” She
watched the video of Ahmaud Arbery going about his jog in his neighborhood, only to be
attacked and shot by three White men whose racist ideology triggered them to act on, and
remove this perceived suspicious, up-to-no-good Black man from their White space. She
watched the news as a no-knock raid was executed on Breonna Taylor’s apartment, leaving her
dead and her boyfriend being blamed for her death. Chase was particularly and visibly moved by
this video, she said, as she recalled the police coming to her home looking for her young son
after the arson at the home of the police officer who killed her relative.
Recalling teenager Jordan Davis, who died, and whose friends were shot at multiple
times even as they were driving away by White man Michael Dunn because their loud music was
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contaminating Michael Dunn’s White public space was painful for Chase. It triggered the
memory of her teenage son and his friend’s experience of being followed and chased by an
unknown White man in a car, which ended with them being held down at gunpoint. The White
man was an off-duty police officer. Like many of the other participants, Chase shared that she is
at the point where she reads it, sees it, feels it, and then cannot read or watch more about the
killings because “it brings up too many memories. It’s grief all over again. … When I see these
killings, it’s like it happened all over again for me, so it’s, like, fresh.”
Considering the factors discussed, compounded with the racism involved, participants’
mental well-being is affected, especially when law enforcement is non-responsive or the death is
by police (Krieger et al., 2015). This combination left the study participants with a limited
feeling of justice and certainty of never getting true justice because their relatives are not coming
back to life. Chaney and Robertson (2015) stated,
Clearly, the murder of unarmed Black males and females has several negative
consequences for members of this community. For one, these murders demonstrate to
members of this group that, when compared with Whites, their lives have little value, and
this is especially true when individuals who murder them are generally exempt from
punishment. One could logically argue that terminating the employment and making the
law enforcement agent financially accountable for the untimely death of an unarmed
African American would not bring these individuals back to their families. (p. 62)
Finding 2: Black Women ’s Intersectional Identities Compound the Mental Trauma They
Experience Interacting with the Law
From its origins, intersectionality has been a theory of investigating the overlapping and
often conflicting power dynamics of various marginalized identities, including race, class,
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gender, sexuality, nationality and other inequities in determining social outcomes (Cho et al.,
2013; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). These social outcomes can be contextualized along the axis of
privilege, discrimination, prejudice, access, and equity (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). The composition
and interplay of these identities in any given situation for Black women is more inexorable than
for most other racial, ethnic, or social groups. As such, Black women are much more subjected to
disrespect, discrimination, and outright devaluation of their self-identity and self-worth and left
with deep feelings of helplessness (Winters, 2020).
According to Wade (2020), “The one-dimensional caricature of the Angry Black Woman
is often used to silence us [Black women] into submission, mischaracterizing anything from
insufficient positivity to passive neutrality to mild frustration as extreme anger and overreaction”
(p. 56). This statement corroborates the experiences shared by the study participants. They talked
about fighting to be heard and seen and, at the same time, making sure they did not exemplify the
very fatiguing ABW stereotype. Several participants were doing exactly that. For instance, law
enforcement cursed at and threatened Nettie several times because she angrily called their
headquarters 2 days after her son’s murder to try to get someone to share information with her.
After this experience, she acquiesced and stopped calling. In actuality, she retreated silently,
waiting for them to call her. She waited 426 agonizing, depression-filled, traumatizing days
before someone in the law enforcement community called her. Prior to this experience, her
identity as a mother was called into question and denied.
For Black women, devaluing their motherhood, that specific identity they hold, is
devasting and traumatizing (Roberts, 1997/2017). Law enforcement chose to engage with her
Nettie’s father, whose last name he bore as the only connection between them, and not with her,
the single mother who raised him his entire life. This denial and diminishing of Nettie’s
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motherhood, as Roberts (1997/2017) described it, “cuts at the heart of what it means to be valued
as a woman” (p. 10). This experience also resonated with the other participants, who are
mothers, as they fought law enforcement’s and society’s dogma that somehow, they were to be
blamed for their children’s demise.
Neighborhood geography and economic status are other significant identities that affect
Black women’s mental health trauma. Poverty itself is a risk factor for mental illnesses like
PTSD. The added racism and the overall feeling of hopelessness lead to community violence and
a repetitive cycle of race-based trauma (Snyder, 2020). Although most of the participants did not
describe themselves as living in poverty, they spoke about living in proximity to urban (i.e.,
inner city, the hood) communities in which most people were raised in poverty and with limited
resources. They also spoke explicitly of the role of poverty in perpetuating prejudice and
community violence as agents of trauma in these primarily minoritized communities.
Herman (2015) concurred that trauma is an additional outcome of witnessing violence.
The residual effects of community violence brought on by the intersection of racism and
economic disadvantages affect the participants in either of three ways (Snyder, 2020):
• Victimization, which is being the target of violence and traumatic situation;
• Witnessing trauma, which is experiencing the traumatic situation or violence
happening to someone else; and
• Vicarious exposure, which is hearing about something traumatic or violent having
occurred.
Half of the participants experienced community violence against their relatives associated with
inner city conditioning. Snyder (2020) wrote, “When you’re poor, and your back is up against
the wall, you end up doing whatever is necessary to survive --- including engaging in criminal
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activity” (p. 51). Wilbe’s experience aligns with this position, as she stated that her son’s killer
did not stand a chance because of his upbringing in an environment that lacked resources or
better choices.
Black women experience multiple complex stresses associated with their overlapping
identities and societal controls intended to naturalize their social subordination (Hill Collins,
2000; Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). One identity that Black women take seriously is motherhood
be it their own children or not: “Protecting Black children remains a primary concern of African-
American mothers” (Hill Collins, 2000, p. 197). This is true of all the participants, particularly
those who lost children. They expressed feelings of failure, experienced disrespect, and
powerlessness as they sought answers and accountability for their loved ones, and were pushed
to submission and silence, all of which harmed their mental and physical health.
Although Black women have plenty to be angry about, Winters (2020) shared the
comments of one Black woman that embodies the oppression Black women face due to their
intersecting identities. She said, “I have learned (internalized) that suppressing my feelings, truth
and anger (despite how much studies show that this could be a detriment to my health) is worth
not being characterized as or associated with being an ‘angry Black Woman’” (p. 122). This
statement supports Erma’s recollection of having officers of the law tell her to just go to therapy
because she was so angry. She stated, “it irritated my soul. No, I’m talking to you all about the
person who killed my son, and you are telling me about a therapist. What does a therapist have to
do with the justice system?” She continued, “I asked them you have to think if this was your
child would you want someone telling you to go to a therapist and we talking about the law?”
She described it as so draining that she told herself it was nothing she could change: “just
continue to try to survive and leave the justice system alone.”
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At that moment of the interview, Erma let out what she had been internalizing. Amidst
tears, she said she told herself,
You know, they can’t bring back your son. Can’t nobody bring back your son. Can
nobody can bring back your son. Just continue to try to do the things you need to do. But
then, the next day or night, I will say something always hit me and say, no, F that! I’m
going to send out this email. I’m going to call this person. But I don’t want to stay mad.
So, I have both of those moments that I deal with every day. It affects me. It’s so
draining.
Research Question 3: How do Black Women Experience the Societal Myth About Black
Women ’s Resilience in the Context of Their Ability to Deal With the Unjust Killing of
Their Unarmed Relatives?
According to Wade (2020),
The role of Black women in [U.S.] history has been one of providing comfort and
protection, acting as a barrier against those we are forced to serve and their grief, even
when we are unable to be a barrier between ourselves or our loved ones and the reality of
loss and death. (p. 58)
Birthed by a dominant culture system that historically controlled and determined Black
women’s images and behavioral expectations, this quote about the role of Black women could
not be more accurate about the study participants. The data analysis in Chapter Four showed that
each of them consciously or instinctively slipped into the role of protector-in-chief of friends,
relatives, and even the whole community mourning the killings of their unarmed relatives. Being
in this role often added new layers of stress and trauma for the participants as they stifled their
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grief to make space and be the rock for others. In addition, for several of them, the feeling that
their identity and sense of self were lost and that, alternatively, they were invisible, is real.
Finding 1: The Spillover Effect on Others Multiplies the Impacts on The Black Women
Whose Relatives Were Killed
In their study of police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of Black
Americans, Bor et al. (2018) described spillover as the adverse effects on the larger Black
community who were exposed to the incidents, not just the victims and their immediate families.
Explaining the spillover effect, Curtis et al. (2021) stated, “unjust and destabilizing racial and
sociopolitical events may lead to widely experienced psychological distress and accompanying
adverse health effects, particularly for persons who identify with victims” (p. 1). The participants
in this study shared information about the impact on their friends and family members of the
killings of their unarmed relatives, which is supported by the conclusions from Bor et al. and
Curtis et al.. One highlighted difference, however, is that this study’s participants also spoke of
the physical health impacts on their family members, not just psychological, as supported by
Sewell et al.’s (2021) study on illness spillovers of police violence. For instance, Wilbe and Tish
spoke of the deterioration of their mothers’ health. Wilbe’s mother’s health, as she described it,
“went completely down, and she had to receive a double lung transplant.” Tish spoke of her
concern as her mother had the sudden onset of high blood pressure.
As widely known and discussed regarding RQ 2, Black women take on roles of
protecting and supporting others in distress. The caretaking and endurance of Black women were
not focused on themselves but rather directed mostly toward others’ well-being (Beauboeuf-
Lafontant, 2007). It is not different when they are experiencing their own stress and trauma,
making space for others’ hurt, grief, and pain occurs, which has a multiplying effect on their
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own. Menakem (2017), discussing body-to-body trauma transference, posited that “when one
unsettled body encounters another, the unsettledness tends to compound in both bodies” (p. 39).
There is a lack of empirical literature directly addressing this finding specifically for
Black women. However, the participants shared experiences to support this finding with general
literature around specific topics embedded in their experiences. One participant spoke
extensively about the spillover effect on her unborn child. Menakem (2017) concurred that “a
fetus growing inside a womb of a traumatized mother may inherit some of the trauma in its DNA
expression. This results in the repeated release of stress hormones, which may affect the nervous
system of the developing fetus” (p. 40).
The participant explained that her grieving was disrupted, and her mental health care
focused on learning how to help her child. From a young age, her child demonstrated mental
health issues, anger, depression, anxiety, and hypersensitivity. She attributed his issues to the
trauma she experienced, and her diagnosis with PTSD brought on by the unjust killing of her
unarmed relative. These issues are consistent with the learning and remembering babies in utero
can do based on what their mothers go through during pregnancy (Martens, 2013; Skwarecki,
2013). Menakem (2017) went on to conclude that
If the fetus’s mother experiences trauma, or if her earlier trauma causes a variety of stress
hormones to regularly get released into her body, her baby may begin life outside the
womb with less of a sense of safety, resilience, and coherence. (p. 41)
Mostly, cultural norms and a lack of trust in dominant social systems, including the
medical system, dictate that in times of distress, Black people turn to their intra-group social
support systems rather than seek professional help (Laurie & Neimeyer, 2008). Black women, in
particular, have been handed the mantle to fulfill whatever role is needed in guiding their
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families through crisis. In these experiences of their unarmed relatives being killed, they muster
through the complexities of racism, the criminal justice system, the assault on their intersectional
identities, and supporting others (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007), leaving no room for any
consistent or quality time for themselves to manage their trauma, pain or even to just breathe and
grieve (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007). Studies show that left unaddressed, trauma has led to many
more physical health problems for Black people as well. These include high blood pressure,
obesity, diabetes, compromised immune systems, heart problems, intestinal disorders, chronic
inflammation, and musculoskeletal disorders (Alang et al., 2017; Bryant-Davis et al., 2017;
Menakem, 2017; Winters, 2020).
With Black people experiencing higher homicide rates of loved ones and higher levels of
complicated grief symptoms, their life span is shortened (Laurie & Neimeyer, 2008). In an online
Essence Magazine article on Black women and grief, the author noted the experience of grief and
the spillover impact of the killing of unarmed relatives: “For Black women, grief is rarely
‘uncomplicated.’ It can—and often does—kill us. The tragic, preventable losses of Erica Garner,
Eric Garner’s daughter, and Venida Browder, Kalief Browder’s mother … have proved that
beyond all doubt” (West Savali, 2019, para. 17). The deaths of Erica and Venida were presented
in more detail in Chapter Two. The experience of grief symptoms and the spillover impact are
just as true for this study’s participants. Honora, for instance, described her grief experience of
losing her son in these words: “This trauma is life trauma. You never get over it.” She shared the
especially difficult days like his birthday or Mother’s Day when she goes to his gravesite.
Similarly, Erma spoke of her uncontainable grief and visiting her son’s gravesite often because
she wants to be where he is.

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Finding 2: The Invisibility Black Women Feel Triggers a Cycle of Isolation and Repeat
Trauma
According to Walker and Akbar (2020), “at times, Blackness is like wearing an invisible
veil while navigating through life” (p. 67). Such times have been ongoing for Black women
whose lives have been spent navigating a history of marginalization and invisibility (Evans et al.,
2017). It is a constant factor for Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an
unarmed Black relative. As shared in the study participants’ experiences, this invisibility
manifests intra-personally and inter-personally/environmentally, both related to a loss of identity
and a racial and gender oppression.
The legacy of racial and gender oppression has stripped Black women of their self-
identity and replaced it with dominant culture demands and controlling images of what Black
women should be and how they should behave (Evans et al., 2017; Hill Collins, 2000; Jones &
Shorter-Gooden, 2003). This sphere of oppression and Black identity keep Black women caught
in a balancing act of taking care of everyone’s needs and at the same time presenting that they
have it together, despite being invisible (Walker & Akbar, 2020).
From the interpersonal/environmental perspective, Black women’s pain, grief, and anger
due to the violence they experienced threaten the dominant parties’ power, control, and comfort.
Black women’s deep bereavement at the killing of their unarmed Black relatives is an
uncomfortable reminder that America has normalized terror against its Black citizens. Those
supporting and perpetuating these killings, including the police, reject feeling powerless and
blame their discomfort on Black people’s suffering and “not the systems that created it, because
those systems are the foundation of their lives” (Wade, 2020, p. 57).
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How does this relate to the invisibility Black women experience? It does so through
expectations of how they should behave in these situations, meaning that the burden is on them
to do something to remove the discomfort others feel. Black women are expected to react
differently, be friendlier, forgive, comply, and tidy up the situation as well as bear the grief of
everyone around them. Our Black women’s grief does not matter; in essence, it and they are
invisible (Wade, 2020).
The study participants corroborated this experience. They were expected to forgive those
who killed their relatives, told to seek counseling rather than fight for justice (i.e., stay out of the
way of the investigation), accept blame for their roles in the deaths of their loved ones, and be
silent in accepting whatever the authorities and society share with them. Jones and Shorter-
Gooden (2003) explained that doing otherwise would effectively unleash the oppressive
stereotypes of Black women as tough and pushy, not soft or feminine. Essentially, they are not
seen as a whole person with strengths and weaknesses, tender qualities, and tough qualities. This
makes Black women invisible because they are not seen as their whole selves. Wade (2020)
captures this experience of externally-influenced invisibility as such:
In most cases, the expectation is that Black women bear the grief of everyone around us
in addition to our own wounds so that people who require our proximity in order to be
more powerful, more fulfilled, and more secure receive the benefits of our suffering
without having to suffer or even truly witness its consequences. (p. 57)
From the intra-personal perspective, the invisibility discourse suggests socially and
culturally sanctioned self-silencing and isolation (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018). This study
established that systemic racism is at the nucleus of the unjust killing of unarmed Black people in
America. In addition, race-related stress events of Black women contribute to the depression they
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suffer (Kennedy & Jenkins, 2018; Woods-Giscombé, 2010). However, culturally normalized
coping strategies such as self-silencing, SBW presentation, political activism, prayer, and
isolation may act as a barrier that protects women from negative race-related stress (Evans et al.,
2017; Woods-Giscombé, 2010). Albeit, the participants demonstrated an over-reliance on these
maladaptive strategies, particularly isolation, to cope with the invisibility they feel.
When Black women are directly or vicariously impacted by violence, their main coping
strategies are to become withdrawn to shield themselves and their families from further harm or
stay busy (Evans et al., 2017; Hill et al., 1995). This is the action that many of the study
participants took to protect themselves from continuous expressions of sympathy,
encouragement, or conversation about the deaths of their relatives. They also took these actions
to control the situation as a way to bring about change for the community so that another person
does not have to experience a similar tragedy. Fundamental to both of these reasons are the
participants’ feelings of invisibility.
Black women are the least likely to seek professional psychological help (Kennedy &
Jenkins, 2018; Williams, 2008). Superimpose that their push for peace and justice are made
invisible, trivialized, or misrepresented, and they retreat to their safe haven of isolation (Evans et
al., 2017). Left in their own thoughts and brokenness, they gravitate towards a distorted view of
their own identities. This new self-identity is mostly shaped by seeing themselves through the
eyes of others, including the implicit dictates of White supremacy culture that limit them to
seeing this way (Taylor, 2016).
Due to worrying about how society sees or does not see them, questioning their abilities
to protect their loved ones and get justice, uncertainty about who they are in the face of the
tragedy, and exercising yeoman’s efforts to avoid being in situations where others bring up the
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deaths of their loved ones, these women often develop PTSD. In their isolation, they cut off
social support systems and shy away from professional help.
Combined, all these factors keep the wheels on the cycle of trauma turning. “Trauma
hurts. It can fill us with reflective fear, anxiety, depression, and shame. It can cause us to fly off
the handle; to reflexively retreat and disappear” (Menakem, 2017, p. 42). This quote captures the
isolation and repetitive traumatic symptoms Black women experience, as shared by the study
participants, that are triggered by their feelings of invisibility and loss of identity.
Finding 3: Expectation of Outward Strength Magnify the Internalized Trauma Black Women
Experience
As discussed in Chapter Four and shown in Table 5, most of the participants admitted to
the façade of outer strength while the emotional turmoil raged inside in dealing with the deaths
of their loved ones. The acronym SOLLIAH, which stands for “she only looks like it ain’t
hurting” (Williams, 2008), could be the name of every Black woman in America and every
participant in this study. Honora claimed that the strength Black women show in the face of
cultural atrocities “is indicative of our DNA, nature, and lineage.” In other words, she sees it as a
natural, innate way of being for Black women. Wilbe was direct about how it shows up for her.
Wilbe began a foundation to honor her son, and in doing so, she said everybody she talks to
thinks, “Oh, you’re so strong, … and that’s because that’s what I show the world. But, inside,
I’m crumbling every day.”
Wilbe stated that she does not feel the strength others project on her. In fact, she said that
she feels like her insides are screaming. She finds all of it, the pretend strength and the
suppressed trauma, oppressive. However, she knows that people depend on her to take care of
them and to turn her tragedy into a mission to save the lives of other Black boys. That is why the
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foundation is important and why she keeps going. “So, I don’t really think I have really allowed
myself to grieve,” she said. She has to keep going or take on another project, she described, to
not get caught up in the emotions. This setting aside their needs and health to take care of others
first is true for Wilbe, the other participants, and Black women in general now and historically.
Throughout history, Black women have been valued for being selfless and sacrificing
everything to keep their families safe, communities whole, and the race alive (Beauboeuf-
Lafontant, 2007; Daniel Barnes, 2016; Donovan & West, 2015; Williams, 2008; Woods-
Giscombé, 2010). This is the social construct of the SBW or Superwoman (Donovan & West,
2015). This construct, however, is built on race and gender stereotyping and oppression. It can
laud the fortitude and resiliency of Black women while at the same time causing harm to their
mental and physical well-being (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2009; Donovan & West, 2015; Evans et
al., 2017; Wade, 2020; Winters, 2020), the latter of which they keep hidden or suppressed.
In the study by Woods-Giscombé (2010), the Black women were proud to be seen as
strong and self-reliant. After all, they are standing on a remarkable legacy of Black women who
lived through the diabolical cruelty of slavery, went to bed every night, and had the courage to
wake up the next day knowing that they would still be enslaved (DeGruy, 2005; Jacobs,
2001/1861; Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). However, they also expressed a sense of distress
about feeling obligated to be the pillar of strength most of the time (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2009;
Woods-Giscombé, 2010).
High stress levels, depression, anxiety, and physical ailments show up in the SBW
because there is no allowance for expressions of perceived weakness. With no outlet to balance
strengths with vulnerabilities, it creates an internal pressure cooker with no valve to reduce and
release the pressure as stress builds up (Donovan & West, 2015; Evans et al., 2017).
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The Black women in this study were afraid of letting people down, especially their
relatives who were killed. With this in mind, and as a way of protecting themselves, they felt that
they had to show society that they had it together and could handle everything thrown at them in
the face of such major trauma. They all presented as strong, self-reliant, and self-assured women
who have been able to control the numerous stressors in their lives associated with being a Black
woman in America. This is what friends and family expect of them or how they were raised. In
the experience of the killings of their unarmed relatives, this study found many examples of
participants putting themselves aside as they tended to the needs of employers, partners, children,
family, friends, and community; everyone but themselves (Williams, 2008). “Living this way is
not healthy. It leads to being emotionally exhausted, feeling resentful, and poor health”
(Williams, 2008, p. 76). Menakem (2017) shared that untreated trauma can cause people to do
things to themselves that do not make sense. This could include harming themselves or others.
Untreated trauma can be passed from one generation to the next, which is what Black women
have experienced since the days of slavery (Bryant-Davis et al., 2017; Danieli, 1998; Harrell,
2000).
As the literature supports, Black women’s ways of addressing, more like suppressing,
that inner turmoil utilize several coping strategies, primarily prayer, sociopolitical activism,
avoidance, isolation, counseling, and fighting back (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007; Evans et al.,
2017; Hill et al., 1995; Wolfer, 2000). Most study participants have used the more passive
strategies of avoidance and isolation. Half have turned to prayer, not as a new strategy but one
they have been conditioned to through their religious upbringing. Two have engaged in serious
community and political activism. Four have actively sought professional counseling, although
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two were already receiving therapy and counseling for other matters. A summary of the coping
strategies and participants’ use of them are shown in Table 7.

Table 7
Summary: Coping Strategies and Participants’ Use
Coping strategies
Participant use
Chase Wilbe Tish Honora Nettie Erma
Isolation ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Avoidance ✓
Professional counseling ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Sociopolitical/political
activism
✓ ✓
Prayer/spiritual intervention ✓ ✓ ✓

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Although some of these coping strategies might help release some of the pressure of the
internalized stress that Black women have, they are mainly problem-solving solutions and not
intended to heal the pain of the trauma. These coping strategies can add to the physical and
emotional scarring that Black women experience (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2009; Evans et al.,
2017; Hill et al., 1995). When that physical and emotional pain becomes too much, Black
women rarely vocalize their need for support because that request “may be greeted with
condemnation of their ‘weakness’ and admonished to ‘get it together’” (Evans et al., 2017, p. 47)
or “What do you have to be depressed about? If our people could make it through slavery, we
can make it through anything. Take your troubles to Jesus, not no damn psychiatrist”
(Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007, p. 34).
For many Black women, even if professional help were offered, they would refuse it.
Like many of the study participants, they have internalized the stereotype of being the SBW, of
being unshakable (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). When in anguish, they continue to sustain
their image of invincibility and are unable to turn it off or balance it with exposing their
vulnerabilities to get the help they need (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). As Nettie, put it,
It’s hard for me to be around people because, like I say, it’s almost a guilt feeling. Like
when you start having a good time or feeling a little relief, and you’re like, whoa, you
know this isn’t over. I’m still working on it.
Recommendations for Practice
This section includes recommendations based on the study’s findings and the literature
supported by the theoretical framework on mitigating the mental health impact Black women
experience due to the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America. Central to the
recommendations are the study participants’ responses and the findings associated with
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Interview Questions 14, 15, 17, 18, and 19. These questions asked what support services
participants used and their helpfulness, whether they used services at all, and how in their fight
for justice they saw an opportunity to create space for grieving their losses and the authorities’
responses. They also asked what structures they believed need to be transformed and how they
find joy again.
The following three recommendations are proposed for building systemic equity,
dismantling oppressive systems, and supporting victims, in the inclusive sense, of violent crimes:
a federally unified program with adequate resources for survivors of these killings, a pipeline for
Black therapists and counselors through a higher education-community-government-funded
partnership, and government investment in reimagining public safety. These recommendations,
along with the corresponding key findings and research questions, are summarized in Table 8.
The purposeful selection of the literature that underpins these recommendations is intended to
narrowly focus on Black people and the trauma caused by discrimination and racism.

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Table 8
Summary: RQs, Key Findings, and Recommendations
Research questions Findings Subfindings Recommendations Citations
RQ 1: How do
Black women
who have
experienced the
unjust killing of
an unarmed
Black relative
understand the
mental health
impact of that
event?
Manifestations of
psychophysio-
logical injury

Guilt and
self-
blame
1Create a pipeline
for Black
therapists and
counselors through
a higher education,
community, and
government-
funded
partnership.
Phillips, 2021;
Goode-Cross
& Grim,
2016;
Forman,
2006;
Steinfeldt et
al., 2020;
Smedley et
al., 2002;
Pieterse,
2013; Sue et
al., 2007;
Kelly &
Greene,
2020
Black women
find purpose in
these deaths for
their own
survival.
Black
women
need
release
more than
fixing or
healing.
RQ 2: To what
extent do Black
women who
have
experienced the
unjust killing of
an unarmed
Black relative
view subsequent
responses from
the law as
helpful or
harmful to their
mental health?
Justice is limited. Establish a
federally unified
program with
adequate
resources for
survivors of
these killings.
Office for
Victims of
Crime, 2019;
Yancy &
Jones, 2013;
Butler, 2017;
Winters,
2020; Smith,
2018
Black women’s
intersectional
identities
compound the
mental trauma
they experience
interacting with
the law.

RQ 3: How do
Black women
experience the
societal myth
about Black
women’s
resilience in the
context of their
ability to deal
with the unjust
The spillover
effect on others
multiplies the
impacts on the
Black women
whose relatives
were killed.
The invisibility
Black women
feel triggers a
Government
investment in
reimagining
public safety
Crump, 2019;
Butler, 2017;
Menakem,
2017;
Hernandez,
2012;
Western,
2015;
NFHA,
2017;
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Recommendation 1: Establish a Federally Unified Program With Adequate Resources for
Survivors of These Killings
One participant shared this thought: “We give money out to victims and survivors right
after the tragedy to help them pay bills, but there is no sustainable emotional support for
survivors unless they join a survivors group.” Distributing this money occurs through grants
from state and local organizations grants supported by the Victims of Crime Act and
administered by the U.S. Depart of Justice Office of Victims of Crime (2019). This program
assumes that people have the awareness, time, and means to access their services, which is often
not the case for Black women who are dealing with multiple layers of crime, repeat oppression,
and invisibility because of their interlocking identities. Establishing and fully funding a federally
unified program for survivors of the tragedies of unarmed Black relatives being unjustly killed
would be invaluable. Similar to the one for veterans or cancer survivors (i.e., U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs and National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Control and Population
Sciences), staffing needs to reflect the population seeking service and relate to their tragedy. It
Research questions Findings Subfindings Recommendations Citations
killing of their
unarmed
relatives?

cycle of
isolation and
repeat trauma.
Expectations of
outward
strength
magnify the
internalized
trauma Black
women
experience.
Winters,
2020;
Crenshaw et
al., 1995;
Archbold,
2013
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needs to be barrier-free, prioritize the layers of intersectional inequities, and respect the
intergenerational trauma Black people experience.
Black women suffer long-term PTSD, other trauma, and even death associated with the
unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives (Carter, 2007; Downs, 2016; Smith, 2016; Snyder,
2020; Winters, 2020). They also face discrimination due to the myth of criminality, which claims
that Black women are prone to criminal behaviors (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003), generally
low-level stealing or drug trafficking or defrauding the government and community (i.e., the
welfare queen; Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003). Therefore, Black women are weary and reticent
about seeking support because of these bigoted controlling identities the dominant society gave
them (Hill Collins, 2000).
Cammett (2016), Cheng (2018), and Dow (2015) defined the omnipresent welfare queen
as an irresponsible, lazy Black woman, often a mother, whose main goal is to scam the system.
When Sybrina Fulton, the Black mother of murdered unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, filed
two trademark applications in an attempt to protect Trayvon’s image from exploitation, she was
vehemently accused on social media and other mainstream media of attempting to profit from
her son’s name and image. This parlayed into accusations on various social media sites of being
a bad mother and a welfare recipient trying to exploit her son’s death for monetary gain (Yancy
& Jones, 2013). Beth Holloway is a White woman whose 18-year-old daughter, Natalie
Holloway, disappeared while vacationing in Aruba. In 2011, Beth became the host of a television
series called Vanished with Beth Holloway (Yancy & Jones, 2013). She did not receive the same
bigoted criticisms for attempting to profit from her daughter’s name and image.
The study participants explained that they received better support and relief from
community-organized survivors’ grief groups when similarly experienced counselors were there,
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not the theoretical, textbook counseling, which speaks to the need for appropriate, empathetic
staff. In her struggle for justice and healing, Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, found one
door after another either closed or inaccessible because she was Black, a woman, and poor. After
2 years of this struggle, Erica died of a heart attack at age 27 (Smith, 2018).
All states are expected to have mandatory veterans’ services agencies. Many states
require their counties to have the same. Given the level of PTSD, diminished life span, financial
hardship, and other stressors associated with having an unarmed relative killed, this
recommendation proposes establishing mandatory county-level survivors’ services office similar
to those for veterans’ services. Briefly described, these offices would be funded by the federal
government and have divisions to cater to the various ethnicities and the LGBTQ+ community.
Operating policies and procedures will be uniform and all-inclusive to address all the potential
issues. Included must be content experts with shared identities so that those seeking services can
get immediate assistance with someone to whom they can relate, without having to go through
several layers of reliving and retelling their stories. A comprehensive intake form, for example,
would help survivors prioritize their needs and get them to the services in order of priority. This
way, if a person needs only mental health services, they should not have to go through a financial
intake and then a housing intake before getting to mental health.
These offices must be accessible for walk-ins and appointment services. To the extent
that it is affordable, a 24-hour response telephone service could also be beneficial. Being
established and funded by the federal government provides legal protections on a national level.
It also minimizes potential localized conflicts of local taxpayers not wanting to support such a
service because of internalized stereotypes. This goes back to the criminalizing of Black people
addressed throughout this study. As this stereotype maintains its stronghold, I submit that the
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more affluent residents would reject having their tax dollars spent supporting the families of
these “criminals.”
Recommendation 2: Create a Pipeline for Black Therapists and Counselors Through a
Higher Education-Community-Government-Funded Partnership
This grow-your-own concept is intended to provide and maintain an influx of qualified,
Black therapists and counselors. Qualified Black counselors could give rise to treatment hubs
and better service for Black people in general. In any psychotherapeutic treatment service,
having counselors who match the clients’ backgrounds helps to build the necessary client-
counselor trusting relationship (Forman, 2006; Steinfeldt et al., 2020). Only two of the study
participants actively sought professional counseling after the death of their loved ones. The two
who did not seek counseling indicated they wanted to find a therapist of color, preferably Black,
who could relate to their experiences as Black women. The other two participants were already
in counseling with therapists whom they trusted. As one participant put it, her therapist, who is
White, “doesn’t get it all the way,” but because the therapist is in an interracial marriage and has
Black children, she feels she can trust her.
An editorial in Counseling Today online noted that the counseling profession needs to be
more accessible to non-White clients and non-White counselors alike (Phillips, 2021). According
to 2013 statistics from the American Psychological Association, only 4% of psychologists are
Black, compared with 84% who are White (Lin et al., 2015). In 2017, DataUSA (n.d.) reported
that approximately 70% of counselors are White and 19% are Black. Having Black counselors to
meet the needs of Black women is important, especially since Black women generally hide
behind the SBW syndrome, which rationalizes that seeking therapy is a sign of weakness. Black
counselors will understand that perception. Per Phillips (2021),
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Black counselors’ intersecting identities affect the way they understand the world around
them as well as how others perceive them. “I live and experience situations as a Black
woman every day more than I live as a counselor,” says Noréal Armstrong, a licensed
clinical mental health counselor supervisor in North Carolina and a licensed professional
counselor supervisor (LPC-S) in Texas. (para. 5)
Creating and funding a barrier-free, culturally-specific educational and certification
program will build a pipeline for Black therapists and counselors with ties to the community. It
would help address the racial power dynamics of the cultural environment in the current health
care field, to be specific (Smedley et al., 2002; Steinfeldt et al., 2020; Sue et al., 2007). This
recommendation would require a solid higher education-community-government, public-private
partnership. Government and local foundations can invest in providing free education and related
certification in the field for Black community members interested in this work but lack the
resources to pursue the education. Local resources can be used to help mitigate potential barriers
such as childcare costs, transportation, and other needs. Government resources can help fund
space for culturally specific treatment hubs.
Mistrust in the medical and other treatment fields, particularly of White professionals, is
embedded in Black culture because of historic experimentations, racist denigration, medical
misdiagnosis, or poor medical treatment of Black bodies (DeGruy, 2005; Roberts, 2017). For
providers of color, working in White spaces can also be challenging and discriminatory. In the
Counseling Today article, Noréal Armstrong, a licensed counselor, shared that as a Black woman
in the counseling field, she encountered microaggressions and racism from her White colleagues
(Phillips, 2021). One can pontificate that carrying that burden to work with clients might prove
unproductive.
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According to Goode-Cross and Grim (2016), Black therapists feel connected and
committed to and enjoy working with Black clients, and Black clients prefer to work with Black
therapists. Although ethical practice requires that therapists understand the impact of their
identities and histories on clients and the therapy process, that understanding will not change
how Black women feel about working with non-Black counselors (Kelly & Greene, 2010). “The
psychological literature recognizes that the race, sexual orientation, and gender of the client can
affect the therapeutic relationship and the therapy process” (Kelly & Greene, 2020, p. 11).
Recommendation 3: Government Investment in Reimagining Public Safety
Black Lives Matter! This is a call to action that could have started over 400 years ago
when Black people were enslaved against their will. Slavery ended, and America entered the Jim
Crow era from 1896 to 1954, followed by the Civil Rights Era from 1954 to 1968, then into the
present-day social justice era. One thing common to all of these eras is that racism and
oppression of Black citizens were institutionalized into the soul of America (Bennett, 2017;
DeGruy, 2005; Pratt-Harris et al., 2016; Wertheimer, 1977).
“The thing about racism, though, is that Black people can never become worthy within its
framework. By its very principles, we are not meant to be saved, let alone liberated” (Wade,
2020, p. 149). From 1619 to the current Black Lives Matter movement, if Black people want to
survive and live another day, the opinions and thoughts of those who oppress them have to
matter. They have to matter because they impact Black people’s access to healthcare, education,
food, employment, housing, and life (Wade, 2020).
These are the basic needs, presented in Figure 5, that Maslow determined in the hierarchy
of needs (Adair, 2006). Maslow and other scholars submitted that basic physiological and safety
needs are fundamental to human survival and growth, as are the other needs on the pyramid. If
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those basic needs are not met, people are motivated to do what they must to satisfy them (Adair,
2006).

Figure 5
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Note. From Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by Simply Psychology, 2022.
(https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow-needs4.webp)

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This is one part of what is fueling the community violence causing some of the deaths of
unarmed Black people. The next part is the psychological needs of respect, belonging, love,
strength, and freedom. The constant inferiority, dehumanization, and powerlessness Black people
face due to White supremacist and systemically racist actions fuel the police and vigilante
violence, causing some of the deaths of unarmed Black people.
The third part is self-fulfillment needs. Living in a society that expects Black people to
work twice as hard to be considered half as good, successful, or relevant as White people while
facing daily inequities in access to resources is exhausting (Winters, 2020). This keeps the third
set of needs perpetually illusive. Coupled with the stripping away of Black people’s self-identity
puts Black people in a rebellious and non-compliant state, which can cause some deaths of
unarmed Black people.
The story of Harvard Professor and renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
provides context on the latter. On July 16, 2009, Dr. Gates was arrested for breaking into his own
home, a Harvard University-issued home where he had lived for many years (Cush, 2009). Dr.
Gates was at the pinnacle of his career and beyond, perhaps having achieved his need for self-
actualization and fulfillment when this incident occurred. He pushed back and refused to comply
with the police’s demand to show them identification, his pass, in his own home. For that, he was
arrested, handcuffed, and detained for 4 hours at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police station.
Dr. Gates’ story shows that where they are in fulfilling or not fulfilling their needs on the
hierarchy, Black people remain in the chokehold of systemic racism, and why this
recommendation is essential. Butler (2017) stated, “For people of color to be safe and free, the
old ways of thinking about ‘reform’ and ‘civil rights’ are not only insufficient, they can get in the
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way of the transformation that the United States desperately needs” (p. xii). This
recommendation of reimagining public safety offers a new way of thinking, a revolution per se.
Reimagining public safety is not just about policing, although reform is needed in the
criminal justice system. Reimagining public safety requires an all-encompassing systematic
assessment of the denial of basic human needs perpetuated by government and social systems
that threaten residents’ comfort, satisfaction, value, safety, justice, and happiness. It also calls for
corresponding innovative solutions crafted by those most harmed. To reimagine public safety
means investing in equality of education and the abolishment of the school-to-prison pipeline;
decent, affordable housing; quality, living-wage paying jobs to reduce poverty, food insecurity,
and the desire to make a quick dollar; full transformation of police training and accountability;
and addressing the Black genocide with a community healing plan. These are all ideas shared by
the participants that informed this recommendation.
Equality of Education and Abolishment of the Implicit School-to-Prison Pipeline
The most damaging impact of poor public schools is primarily experienced by lower-
income Black and Brown children. Public schools with a majority of Black and Brown children
are underfunded and underperforming, with a $23 billion difference in funding between those
schools and the ones that serve predominantly White children (Winters, 2020). One participant
shared,
I believe our children should get the same opportunities as other children. The schools are
horrible. Families are placed in housing where the school systems are failing. We don’t
get to choose a school that has good numbers. The children have to go to the school
where they live, and a lot of the times, our children are living in communities that are not
good communities. A lot of times, the teachers don’t teach like the ones we had when we
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were in school. They don’t really care, and they come from different areas, so they don’t
get our children.
Black students are 2.3 times more likely to receive a referral to law enforcement or be
subject to a school-related arrest as White students (UNCF, n.d.). In addition, a study
commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2012 found that children who cannot read at
grade level by the time they are in third grade are most likely to drop out of high school
(Hernandez, 2012). Add poverty to the mix, and a student is 13 times less likely to graduate than
their third-grade reading-proficient, wealthier peers (Hernandez, 2012). When race is factored in,
the study found that about 31% of poor African American students who did not hit the third-
grade proficiency mark failed to graduate (Hernandez, 2012). Also, a prior study by Northeastern
University highlighted the disparities between Black students and others in the school-to-prison
pipeline connected to dropping out of high school. Nearly 23% of all young Black men who have
dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile institute (Sum et al., 2009). In
contrast, the rate is 6 to 7% for Asian, Hispanic, or White male dropouts (Sum et al., 2009).
Students graduating from high school are less likely to wind up in the corrections system
(Western, 2015). These implicit introductions to the criminal justice system are the sources of the
school-to-prison pipeline that need to be eliminated. Instead of blaming the children and the
families, the focus needs to be shifted to fixing the systems failing the families and keeping them
from achieving their fullest potential and self-actualization.
Decent Affordable Housing
The lack of affordable housing is a significant problem. Low-income Black people are
usually concentrated in public housing systems and segregated neighborhoods that are ill-
maintained, ill-supervised, and underinvested (Winters, 2020). In its 2017 housing trends report,
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the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA, 2017) shared that approximately half of all Black
persons and 40% of all Latinos live in neighborhoods without a White presence. The average
White person lives in a neighborhood that is nearly 80% White. Additionally, in its 2020 report,
the NFHA reported that people of color are predominantly renters, while White people are
predominantly homeowners.
There is a direct correlation between a person’s area of residence, home ownership status,
and access to resources and opportunities that impact their socioeconomic outcome and overall
life quality. In Black and Brown segregated neighborhoods, there is generally an absence of jobs,
reliable transportation, fresh food, quality health care services, inadequate public institutions,
failing schools, and services (NFHA, 2017). As referenced before, the lack of these basic needs
contributes to a public safety nightmare for Black people.
Housing for marginalized residents needs to be decentralized and not segregated. That
way, they are less likely to not get the resources needed for improvements and more likely to feel
included in maintaining the neighborhood's safety and improving the quality of their lives.
Quality, Living-Wage-Paying Jobs
To reduce poverty, food insecurity, and the desire or temptation to make a quick dollar
illegally, it is important to provide engaging and fulfilling employment opportunities that pay
well. From 2007 to 2017, the median household income for Black people increased by only $62
(Winters, 2020). That income went from $40,196 in 2007 to $40,258 in 2017. In contrast, for
White people, it increased from $65,089 to $68,145 during the same time, showing a $3,056
increase (Winters, 2020).
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2022), pre-COVID in 2019, the median
weekly earning for a Black adult aged at least 25 years was $770 and $996 for a White adult in
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the same age group. The statistics also showed that in June 2021, the unemployment rate of
Black people at 9.4% was almost double that of White people at 5.4%. Not having enough
household income to meet their basic needs is a public safety crisis as people are inclined to do
what it takes to meet those needs. Creating job training programs that lead to quality jobs and
investing in well-paying employment opportunities are necessary.
Full Transformation of Police Training and Accountability
There has never been a peaceful relationship between police and Black people throughout
the history of the United States (Aymer, 2016; Butler, 2017). Efforts to reform police practices
have proven futile in changing this relationship (Butler, 2017). Critical race theory posits that
violence against Black people is part of a larger narrative of White supremacy embedded in all
human institutions and social systems set up to promote and protect the welfare of our society
(Crenshaw et al., 1995).
Policing is one of those systems. Southern cities developed elaborate police patrol
systems to control the slaves, and the premise of controlling, dehumanizing, and criminalizing
Black people has not been extricated from present-day policing (Alexander, 2010; Archbold,
2013; Butler, 2017). These systems must be remade with built-in accountability and liability for
individual police officers who make choices and hide behind the shield of the system (Archbold,
2013). One concrete step in this transformation is to stop the unwarranted traffic stops of Black
people for minor infractions. Similarly, stopping Black people to search and frisk them for no
legitimate reason must end. The White supremacist rule of law that allows police to use the
defense of having feared for their lives must be stopped. As several study participants expressed,
police must be retrained under a new comprehensive curriculum built on an equity-driven and
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culturally empathetic foundation. This training must incorporate de-escalation, empathy, anti-
racist, and mental health components.
Addressing the Black Genocide With a Community Healing Plan
The slow, implicit, public, and controllable cutting away of the soul of Black people’s
humanity is the renewed Black genocide. Black people are outraged, traumatized, scarred, and
feeling powerless that achieving that need for love, belonging, safety, and respect seems
unattainable. According to Crump (2019),
There are many ways to kill a race of people. You can take away their hope for a better
life. You can deny them access to quality food and health care. You can flood their
community with drugs. You can take away safe, decent housing. You can lock them up
for crimes they did not commit. In short, you can kill their spirit so they become the
walking dead. (p. 5)
Protests and rallies help to create space for releasing the outrage. However, the fear and trauma
also need to be systemically addressed. As participants responded to interview questions about
transformation and finding joy again, they had clarity that there is a need for strategic plans to
address healing between Black people and police and for Black people among themselves. They
must be driven and designed by Black people to address the trauma straining the police-civilian
relationship, causing heightened fear on both sides, and which often results in the police-
involved killing of unarmed Black people.
To reimagine public safety is to address all of these human and social inequities
collectively, simultaneously, and comprehensively. It is transforming the systems of inequities
and not penalizing the behavioral responses of those most vulnerable and impacted by these
163

inequities. This recommendation needs a creative and dedicated investment of funds and human
capital from national, state, and local governments and the communities most affected.
Limitations of the Study
There were several limitations to this study. Although I exhausted many resources and
leads, the Black transwoman population was not included in this study. This is a population that
is oversampled, not trusting of researchers, and afraid of exposure. Over time, they reported not
reaping the benefits of the research in which they participated and instead felt used and, in some
cases, further traumatized. The question asked repeatedly was, what is in it for me? When it was
clarified, this question mainly asked how much they would be paid to participate, not out of
greed or malice, but out of a history of broken promises of benefits from past research. The
research methodology did not include compensation because, as the researcher, I felt payment
would take away from the authenticity and honesty of the participants’ responses. I constructed
the study assuming that participants would want to tell their stories, not considering the scenario
our transwomen experienced.
Another limitation was that several participants wanted to have their names and their
killed relatives’ names mentioned in the study. They felt this was another way to keep their loved
ones present and bring more public attention to their struggles. It was also a way to help them
release some of the very stress and trauma the study aimed to uncover. However, this request
could not be fulfilled because the methodology specified the protection of the participants’
identities through confidential and anonymous data collection and analysis using pseudonyms
and controlling for possible identifiers.
Additionally, some of the cases of those killed are still unresolved. One case is awaiting
trial of the alleged killer, and another is still being investigated, albeit very slowly. One other
164

case has an active civil suit being pursued. This factor presented limitations in the sense that, as
the researcher, I needed to be mindful that the data and analysis would not jeopardize active
investigations or pursuits of justice.
One participant provided written responses to the interview questions. Although, in
reading the responses, I could deduce the participant’s emotional state at the time of writing, it
was not the same as witnessing emotional responses from a Zoom video or in-person interview.
It highlighted the importance of controlling for participants who choose not to voluntarily expose
their high emotions to a stranger, even though they want to tell their story. This could be tied to
the SBW syndrome, on which there is plenty of research. It could also be a reflection of them
just not having enough time in their schedule for an interview and subsequent decompressing of
the emotions and pain it might evoke.
Recommendations for Future Research
To create a balanced argument, future research should consider questions that address the
mental health impact on Black women if the relative died of natural causes or accident versus
being killed unjustly. It would also be valuable research to study the same problem of this
research among transwomen. I also suggest that for future research, it is important to hold space
for others, especially the study participants, which could mean deviating from the original plan
and providing different participation options. Finally, I highly recommend a comprehensive
study on the impact of a community healing plan to address the intergenerational trauma in the
relationship between Black citizens and law enforcement.
Conclusion
Many factors contribute to the race-related trauma Black people in America experience
and the grieving process they endure. Research shows that Black people in America have a 6-
165

year shorter lifespan than White people (CDC, 2022). Black people are more likely to experience
the premature loss of a close family member or relative through homicide, which is a major
contributor to their grief, race-related trauma, and shortened life span (Laurie & Neimeyer,
2008). This study sought to expose the problem that Black women’s mental health is impacted
by the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America. Its purpose is to add to the
evidence about the problem to inform sustainable changes to policies and social practices that
can address the problem.
Six Black women of various gender identities participated in the study. They represented
various geographic locations and income levels and represented both mothers and other relatives
of the unarmed Black males who were killed. The evidence from the literature but mainly from
the analysis of the participants’ responses confirmed that Black women’s mental health is
impacted by the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives. The literature and participants’
narratives confirmed that Black women are at the forefront of fighting for justice for their killed
relatives and policy changes. At the same time, they battle layers of race-based trauma and
PTSD, being the SBW, and fighting against oppressive controls of their identities.
These factors are a part of the system of racism that contributes to Black women’s
internalized oppression, which connects to CRT and intersectionality, the theoretical frameworks
that undergirded this study. Critical race theory contends that historical antecedents are
foundational in analyzing law and society’s impact on contemporary racial oppression of Black
people on several levels. The killing of unarmed Black people, coupled with the limited sense of
justice that the study participants disclosed, is one such example. Participants’ recounting of their
relatives being criminalized in their deaths or figuratively considered N.H.I. reflect Black bodies
166

being lynched and left hanging from trees or Mamie Till’s insistence on humanizing her son in
his casket.
Black women also have to contend with the gender profiling and discounting that come
with being a Black woman in America. When socioeconomic disadvantage is added, it becomes
a trio of stereotypes, oppression, and diminishing efficacy. Throughout this study, the
compounding and complex issues and identities Black women navigate are characterized as
fatiguing. They are stereotyped as SBW. They have internalized this characterization by
overachieving, over-working, fulfilling the expectation to create a mirage for the people around
them so that they feel safe, and self-sacrificing by neglecting their health and need for self-care.
The expectations of these compounding and intersecting conditions in light of dealing
with the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives lead to hypervigilance, fear, diminished
trust, anger, and increased stress levels. Indeed, Black women are constantly shifting, internally
and invisibly degrading their self-identity of Black woman personhood and, as a result, their
mental health. This statement is not to blame Black women for the psychological and
physiological impacts they endure but to headline the omnipresent occurrences of racial and
gender bias they live with as they experience the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives.
The data, findings, and literature of this study revealed about Black women in America
what study participant Honora summarized,
I mean, in some sense, our ancestors have always been facing these kinds of horrible
tragedies. I think some of it is indicative to our DNA, our nature, and the cultural
atrocities that we’ve suffered through slavery. Trauma, it’s deep in us. This is the lineage
from which we’ve come in the United States of America. I think the thing that is just so
disturbing now is that even as far as we’ve come through all of these movements for civil
167

rights and equality, our civilization is still rooted in a history of racism, bigotry, and
discrimination. It’s just as alive today as it always was.

168

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Appendix A: Interview Protocol
Three research questions guided this study:
1. How do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an unarmed Black
relative understand the mental health impact of that event?
2. To what extent do Black women who have experienced the unjust killing of an
unarmed Black relative view subsequent responses from the law as helpful or harmful
to their mental health?
3. How do Black women experience the societal myth about Black women’s resilience
in the context of their ability to deal with the unjust killing of their unarmed relatives?
Participants
For this study, the interview participants will be people who identify as Black women,
live in America, and have been exposed to the experience of unarmed Black people being
unjustly killed in America. Being exposed in this case means having a relative who was killed,
been a direct witness to a killing, watched the videos being repeated in news coverage, or having
a connection to the family of someone who was killed unjustly.
Introduction to the Interview
Thank you for agreeing to talk with me and to share your experience for my research. As
I explained when we first connected, I am a doctoral student at USC doing research on the
mental health experience of Black women related to the unjust killings of their unarmed Black
relatives in America. This is an important topic to me because I have Black sons. Over the last 8
years, they could have suffered the tragic fate of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown many times
over, and I struggle daily to cope with this mentally. I have a few questions that I acknowledge
might be difficult for you to respond to and for me to hear, but it makes it all the more important
191

the need to amplify our experiences as Black women. As I explained previously, our interview
will be video recorded so that I can accurately capture your verbal and physiological responses.
However, the information presented in the research would be anonymous in that you will not be
identified in any way. Is video recording still ok with you? Please know that this is our process,
and we will make space for you to do what you need for self-care in the moment, including
stopping the interview at any point if you so choose.

Table A1
Interview Protocol
Interview questions Potential probes
RQ
Addressed
Key concept/theme
addressed
Since we last met/spoke,
how have things been for
you, generally speaking?
COVID concerns Introductory, ice
breaker, rapport
building
I wonder since our
introduction, if there is
anything else about me
that you thought about that
you’d like to know more
of or ask of me? Any
concerns about doing this
interview?
Anything about me that
would stop you from
continuing the
interview?
Anything you are curious
about?
Introductory, ice
breaker, rapport
building
Can you tell me about your
relative and what
happened to them? What is
your relationship to them?
What does it do for you
when you have to think
about all those feelings and
emotions?
What’s the impact on you?
Are you nervous about
doing this interview?
Humanizing not victim

RQ1 Trust, rapport
building
What is the impact on you of
repeatedly seeing the
videos, hearing, or reading
in the media about
Remembering public
lynchings
Dehumanizing,
Normalizing
RQ1
RQ3
unjust killing, race-
based trauma
systemic racism
invisibility, health
impacts
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Interview questions Potential probes
RQ
Addressed
Key concept/theme
addressed
unarmed Black people
killed?
How do you understand or
experience the mental
health impact on you?
How have these unjust
killings affected your
mental health if any?
If you are not directly
related to the person,
does it affect you
mentally?
RQ1

Mental health
trauma, othering,
invisible
victimization
In what other ways has the
unjust killing of your
relative affected your life?
What’s the spillover effect
on your life? Work life?
Family? Social
networks?
RQ1 Race-based trauma,
systemic racism,
invisible
victimization,
justice, health
impacts
Can you describe your
experience interacting with
law enforcement and the
legal system following the
death of your relative?
RQ2 Invisibility, justice,
systemic racism

To what extent do you
view/experience the
subsequent responses from
law enforcement or the law
in general as helpful to
your mental health, if at
all?
How do you think the
reactions/responses from
the authorities help or
exacerbate those impacts
on Black women?
Secondary layer of race-
based trauma
RQ2,RQ1

Justice, race-based
PTSD, racial
battle fatigue
To what extent do you
view/experience the
subsequent responses from
law enforcement as
harmful to your mental
health, if at all?
RQ2,
RQ1

From your experience, how
are systemic disparities
perpetuating the race-
based trauma Black
women experience as a
result of the unjust killing
of their unarmed relatives?
Historic racial inequities
and mental health
spillover
Variables of systemic
racism and oppression –
poverty, lack of health
care, dismissed
RQ1,
RQ3
White supremacy,
Justice, othering,
race-based PTSD,
racial battle
fatigue, systemic
racism,
intersectionality
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Interview questions Potential probes
RQ
Addressed
Key concept/theme
addressed
How do you think others see
you and your capacity to
deal with these unjust
killings?
Unsubstantiated belief
about the strength of
Black women, physical
health impacts
RQ1,
RQ3
Justice, othering,
race-based PTSD,
systemic racism,
intersectionality,
internal turmoil
How have you experienced
the oppressive societal
myth about being the
strong Black woman in
dealing with the unjust
killing of your unarmed
relative?
Black women’s survival
from slavery, Black
women’s tolerance or
inability to feel
pain/hurt,
How did you deal with
your relative’s death?
RQ3,
RQ1,
RQ2
justice, othering,
race-based PTSD,
racial battle
fatigue, systemic
racism,
intersectionality,
isolation,
internalized
trauma
What’s your awareness of
the availability of
professional support
services to help you cope
with the mental or other
health trauma you may
have experienced?
Availability and
accessibility to
culturally sensitive
mental health resources
RQ1,
RQ3
othering, systemic
disparities,
secondary layers
of raced-based
trauma,
recommendations
What support services have
you used and to what
extent have they helped
you?
Access to quality health
resources, do you have
this option?
RQ1,
RQ3
Family, systemic
disparities,
recommendations
If you have not used any
support services, why not?
(Dis)Trust of the services
and service
professionals available
How have you been able
to cope? Who/What is
helping?
RQ1,
RQ3
systemic disparities,
SBW,
vulnerability,
silence, isolation,
recommendations
How have you experienced
invisibility in the context
of the killing of your
relative?
Asking for help without
seeming narcissistic or
making it about you
The masks you wear
What would it take to be
visible?
RQ1,
RQ3
Othering, systemic
disparities, raced-
based health
trauma,
intersectionality,
isolation
Where, when, how in your
fight for justice do you feel
that you have the
opportunity to create space
How is that experience for
you to mute those
emotions and feelings?
RQ1,
RQ2,
RQ3
Fight for justice,
intersectionality,
PTSD, ABW,
SBW, silence,
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Interview questions Potential probes
RQ
Addressed
Key concept/theme
addressed
for your own grieving
related to the killing of
your relative and
subsequent responses by
authorities?
Coping with secondary
levels of race-based
PTSD.
racism, isolation,
internalized
trauma
Given your experience with
this death what structures
do you need to see
transformed?
What needs to change to
stop this from
happening? To help
survivors?
RQ1,
RQ2
disparities, systemic
oppression,
recommendations
Given what you have gone
through and still live with
related to this death, how
did you find joy again?
what brings you joy? What
makes your heart beat
better?
RQ1,
RQ3
Uplift,
recommendations,
relief

Conclusion to the Interview
Thanks again for sharing your truth about this issue with me. As Black women, we
organically became a part of a special sorority that emerged because of these unjust killings. We
have similarities and differences in how we experience these tragedies; regardless, we are
impacted. Thanks for allowing me to use your experience, along with those of other Black
women, to shed light on this issue. If needed, may I contact you again for anything that might
need clarification?

195

Appendix B: Recruitment Email
Dear Potential Participant,
My name is Leslyn McBean-Clairborne, and I am a doctoral candidate in the Rossier
School of Education at the University of Southern California (USC). As part of my dissertation, I
am conducting research on the mental health experience of Black women related to the unjust
killings of their unarmed Black relatives in America. This topic is important to me as a Black
woman and mother of Black sons. Over the last 12 years, my sons could have suffered the tragic
fate of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown many times over, and I struggle daily to cope with this
mentally. In this study, I am examining the impact of systemic racism and Black women’s
intersectional identities (i.e., gender identity, race/ethnicity, economic status) in silencing Black
women, perpetuating race-related trauma, and rendering them the invisible victims of the unjust
killings of their unarmed Black relatives. This research has been approved by USC’s institutional
review board (IRB).
I invite you to please participate in the study if you meet the following criteria:
a. You identify as an adult Black woman of any gender and live in the United States of
America.
b. You are a mother or any relative and have been exposed to the experience of unarmed
Black relatives being unjustly killed within the last 15 years. Being exposed in this
case means having been a direct witness to a killing of an unarmed Black person,
watched the videos of unarmed Black people killed being repeated in news coverage,
having an unarmed Black relative who was killed, or having a connection to the
family of an unarmed Black person who was killed unjustly.
c. You are physically and mentally capable of making an independent decision to
participate in this study voluntarily.

If you agree to participate, you will be invited to
a. Meet with me for an in-person introduction at a place of your choosing. This will give
us an opportunity to get to know each other a little and allow me to explain more
about the study. You can opt not to do this or to meet electronically.
b. Sign a written consent to participate in the study.
c. Participate in the actual recorded interview for 60–90 minutes using Zoom.
196

Participation in this study is entirely voluntary. As a participant, your identity will
remain confidential at all times during and after the study, unless you give written
permission for me to share identifying information about you. You may also choose to
discontinue participating at any time during the study.

Please contact me at xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx if you are willing to participate.
Thank you in advance for your kind participation.

Leslyn McBean-Clairborne

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator McBean-Clairborne, Leslyn (author)

Core Title Black women’s mental health is impacted by the unjust killing of their unarmed Black relatives in America

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Organizational Change and Leadership (On Line)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 08/25/2022

Defense Date 08/15/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Black criminalization,Black women,gender-oppressive experiences,Healing,invisible victims,limited justice,Mental Health,OAI-PMH Harvest,Racism,SBW,unarmed Blacks,unjust killing

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Krop, Cathy (committee chair), Dunkley, Daihnia (committee member), Hinga, Briana (committee member)

Creator Email leggachedda@gmail.com,mcbeancl@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111379775

Unique identifier UC111379775

Legacy Identifier etd-McBeanClai-11158

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights McBean-Clairborne, Leslyn

Type texts

Source 20220825-usctheses-batch-975 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu