On Friday, June 5th of this year, I got a letter from the state of Indiana officially designating me as “medically frail.”
According to the US Department of Labor, I am 18% disabled.
I have herniated discs in the L3-L4, L4-L5, & L5-S1 sections of my spine. I have facet joint hypertrophy throughout my lumbar spine.
X-rays of my thoracic spine show bone spurs and condensing of the vertebrae.
Every doctor, physical therapist, or bodyworker I’ve been to is fairly confident there are herniated discs in my thoracic spine as well (something that’s pretty rare), but because the American healthcare system is a constant failure to Black women, I have yet to receive a complete spinal MRI since I injured my back working at a restaurant in October 2016.
I’d already done considerable damage to my spine during my 10+ years working long days on set in the film industry before that, and the injury definitely didn’t help.
My entire spine is arthritic, this condition is degenerative and is expected to progress as I age.
Since the injury, the arthritis in my back has spread to my hips, hip flexors, and shoulders.
I also have tendinitis and arthritis in my right ankle because of an injury I sustained at a party in 2008.
I think all of my friends that were with me at the time of the injury can now admit that had I been a white woman, their reaction to my injury likely would’ve been different but, I had the weed and everyone was waiting for me down by the pool so, priorities ya know?
The most painful position for my body is lying face down, worse on a hard surface.
At a march on that same Friday, June 5th organized by Indy10 Black Lives Matter, we laid face down in a circle at the intersection of 38th St & Lafayette Ave (an extremely busy intersection) here in Indianapolis for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. The amount of time George Floyd was pinned to the pavement as three Minneapolis police officers murdered him.
By the end of the first minute, I was shaking in agony. By the end of the second I was weeping.
I’m still not sure who I wept for though.
I don’t know if I wept for my own wrecked body that at the age of 36, has been chewed up and spit out far before it’s time. First by the film & tv industry, second by the restaurant industry, and finally utterly failed by the American healthcare system.
Or maybe I wept for George Floyd who had lain in this exact position, knowing he was dying as the air left his lungs, crying out for his mother though he knew she was dead. He will never receive justice.
Or perhaps I wept for Breonna Taylor, whose 27th birthday it would’ve been that day had she not been murdered by police officers who entered her apartment unannounced in the middle of the night with a “no-knock warrant” and fired 22 shots at god knows what. She will never receive justice.
Or were these tears for Dreasjon Reed? The smiling 21 year old who pleaded with his friends on Facebook live “Somebody come get my stupid ass!” just before he was murdered in broad daylight by an Indianapolis Metro Police Department officer who has yet to be arrested. I fear he too will never receive justice.
They could’ve just been tears for every Black life that was stopped too soon. By the police, by the system, by the struggle...
As I lay in the street, instead of thinking about my pain, I thought of all of them. The grandmother I never got to meet. The beloved uncle who was shot on my 16th birthday. The cousins who died. The ones no one has heard from in ages.
I thought of Eric Garner, the NYC man whose murder by the NYPD changed my life in 2014 and I thanked him through my tears. It wasn’t that before him I didn’t know about the way police unfairly target Black people, I think Black people are born with that knowledge imprinted into our DNA. I can’t remember a time when the sight of a police officer didn’t make me feel fear.
No, it was that before Garner, I didn’t realize how much the rest of the world seemed to think the police were justified in their treatment of us. If they were arresting so many Black people, if prisons were full of Black people, well then we must be doing something to deserve it right?
Like a fool, I’d spent the first 30 years of my life believing that non-Black people understood something of the systemic racism and anti-Blackness we faced. Clearly, I was mistaken.
With all of them in mind, I moved the pain from my back to my heart, and I sobbed it out onto the hot asphalt.
Eventually I had to get in a medic truck because I couldn’t walk anymore. I hated it. I felt ashamed. I felt like I was letting them all down.
But I didn’t let anyone down.
It is y’all who have let US down and you must do better.
Not just for the ones who are gone, but the ones who are still with us.
It is not enough for the police to stop killing us.
It’s not enough to get Trump out of the White House.
It’s not enough to flip the Senate.
We need teachers who believe in our ability to excel, and curriculum that tells the truth about history and includes Black life as part of the American experience.
We need redlining, and racist zoning laws and housing regulations to be treated as the hate crimes that they are.
We need to abolish the criminal justice & prison systems as we know them and come up with a new model because what we’re doing now clearly does not work.
Specifically, this means ending the cash bail system, decriminalizing sex work, decriminalizing drugs, and abolishing & replacing other systems that unfairly target Black people.
Yesterday, I had what should have been a simple 20 minute surgery to remove a cyst. Unfortunately, during the removal of the cyst, the surgeon damaged my urethra, and a urologist had to be called in to repair it. I ended up being in surgery for over two hours and now I’ve got a catheter for at least a week.
After my surgery, the gyno came out to update my [white] girlfriend about the procedure. She was told that a mistake was made, he apologized profusely, he said he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about this for a week. Once I was awake, he never came to see me at all nor have I heard anything from him since.
Instead, a resident came in and told me that they “had to” damage the urethra to remove the cyst. No admission of culpability, no apology, no regrets expressed. Then they gave me five prescription strength painkillers and sent me on my way.
You could say I’m reading too much into this. You could say that maybe he’s just a coward and didn’t want to face the person whose body he’d actually harmed, but even that is a product of anti-Blackness.
Why did he feel the need to apologize to the white woman who wasn’t actually suffering, but felt no similar responsibility to me, his patient? Why are my accounts of my pain often dismissed by doctors? Why am I consistently denied painkillers?
It’s a deadly combination of doctors feeling less beholden to their Black patients than others (after all, we’re not an authority on anything, not even our own bodies), and an archaic yet pervasive belief that Black people feel pain differently (less) than other races.
Again, this is something I’ve always known to be true, but the rest of the y’all seem to have just gotten wise since the Great White Awakening (that’s what I like to call this moment of racial awareness we’re having) began.
We as a country do not have a problem with the police, or doctors, or clothing companies, or media, we have a problem with anti-Blackness and no one and nothing is excused from that.
These problems have flourished in an alarming way over the last four years, but to blame America’s current racial fever pitch on that trashbag in the White House is a dangerous narrative. Anti-Blackness is prevalent in America because it is built into the fabric of this country.
Our foundational documents do not recognize Black people as citizens. The police as we know it began as a force to catch Black folks who had escaped slavery. Black people weren’t even allowed to be treated in the same hospitals as white folks in some places until the 1960s because of racist beliefs about our hygiene.
These are not systems that can be “reformed” into tools of equality, they were created to suppress Black people, and that ethos will always exist in them somehow. They must be dismantled and replaced with systems created to serve ALL Americans, not just white ones.
The changes I propose are indeed radical, but that’s because anti-Blackness is ubiquitous and pervasive and has seeped into every corner of our way of life.
On an individual level, everyone needs to examine how unconscious bias & ingrained racism towards Black people comes into play— at work, in social situations, in romance, and in sexual encounters.
Reflect on the way you see us as a means to the end of your pleasure— via entertainment, food, athletic ability, sexual pleasure, cultural caché, style, etc; and yet have no interest in or respect for our Blackness outside of how you can consume it.
Voting for Joe Biden & Kamala Harris will not get any of these things done. I will be absolutely thrilled if they somehow manage to pull out a win, but I also know that even if they do, the work has only just begun.
Please don’t break my heart and waste this opportunity to finally begin to do right by us. Please, don’t let us down.
Fuck this is heavy, appreciate you sharing so openly.