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Paperback 9781523091300
PDF eBook 9781523091317
ePub 9781523091324
Audio Book 9781523091331


BLACK FATIGUE

HOW RACISM ERODES THE MIND, BODY, AND SPIRIT

MARY-FRANCES WINTERS (AUTHOR) | ROBIN MILES (NARRATED BY)

Publication date: 09/15/2020



This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the
intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological
health of Black people—and explain why and how society needs to collectively do
more to combat its pernicious effects.

Black people, young and old, are fatigued, says award-winning diversity and
inclusion leader Mary-Frances Winters. It is physically, mentally, and
emotionally draining to continue to experience inequities and even atrocities,
day after day, when justice is a God-given and legislated right. And it is
exhausting to have to constantly explain this to white people, even—and
especially—well-meaning white people, who fall prey to white fragility and too
often are unwittingly complicit in upholding the very systems they say they want
dismantled.

This book, designed to illuminate the myriad dire consequences of “living while
Black,” came at the urging of Winters's Black friends and colleagues. Winters
describes how in every aspect of life—from economics to education, work,
criminal justice, and, very importantly, health outcomes—for the most part, the
trajectory for Black people is not improving. It is paradoxical that, with all
the attention focused over the last fifty years on social justice and diversity
and inclusion, little progress has been made in actualizing the vision of an
equitable society.

Black people are quite literally sick and tired of being sick and tired. Winters
writes that “my hope for this book is that it will provide a comprehensive
summary of the consequences of Black fatigue, and awaken activism in those who
care about equity and justice—those who care that intergenerational fatigue is
tearing at the very core of a whole race of people who are simply asking for
what they deserve.” 


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Book Details

Overview
This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the
intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological
health of Black people—and explain why and how society needs to collectively do
more to combat its pernicious effects.

Black people, young and old, are fatigued, says award-winning diversity and
inclusion leader Mary-Frances Winters. It is physically, mentally, and
emotionally draining to continue to experience inequities and even atrocities,
day after day, when justice is a God-given and legislated right. And it is
exhausting to have to constantly explain this to white people, even—and
especially—well-meaning white people, who fall prey to white fragility and too
often are unwittingly complicit in upholding the very systems they say they want
dismantled.

This book, designed to illuminate the myriad dire consequences of “living while
Black,” came at the urging of Winters's Black friends and colleagues. Winters
describes how in every aspect of life—from economics to education, work,
criminal justice, and, very importantly, health outcomes—for the most part, the
trajectory for Black people is not improving. It is paradoxical that, with all
the attention focused over the last fifty years on social justice and diversity
and inclusion, little progress has been made in actualizing the vision of an
equitable society.

Black people are quite literally sick and tired of being sick and tired. Winters
writes that “my hope for this book is that it will provide a comprehensive
summary of the consequences of Black fatigue, and awaken activism in those who
care about equity and justice—those who care that intergenerational fatigue is
tearing at the very core of a whole race of people who are simply asking for
what they deserve.” 


About the Authors
Mary-Frances Winters (Author)
Mary-Frances Winters is the founder and president of the Winters Group Inc. She
has been helping clients create inclusive environments for over three decades.
She was named a top ten diversity trailblazer by Forbes and a diversity pioneer
by Profiles in Diversity Journal and is the recipient of the prestigious ATHENA
Award, as well as the Winds of Change Award conferred by the Forum on Workplace
Inclusion. Winters is also the author of We Can’t Talk about That at Work and
Inclusive Conversations.
Robin Miles (Narrated by)

Excerpt
Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit


ONE


MY BLACK FATIGUE

I was hard-pressed to name it. It is an underlying syndrome of sorts that
permeates my very being. It operates like a dull droning sound that is always
present but most of the time is drowned out by the higher pitches of my optimism
and hope. I now know it to be Black fatigue.

In sharing my story, I relate experiences of individual racism that do not
explicitly uncover the systems that undergird such examples and make them
possible. Racism operates at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional,
and structural levels. It is often systemic racism that creates the day-to-day
personal experiences that I share here and throughout the book.


THE EARLY YEARS

My Black fatigue started when I was five years old. Of course, I did not know it
then, but I now recognize how that incident affected me and the way I would
interact with the world from then on. I was in kindergarten in 1956, just two
years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision banning segregated
schools.1 I was oblivious to all of that because I lived in the small town of
Niagara Falls, New York, where the population was about 100,000 at that time and
the Black population was probably no more than 10 percent. My school therefore
was predominantly white. As a matter of fact, Karen (not her real name) and I
were the only two Black children in the class. The ugliness of racism did not
escape us.

One day Bobby (not his real name), a freckle-face white boy, called Karen and me
the “n” word. We were not exactly sure what it meant, but we knew it was not
nice, so we started crying. The teacher came to our rescue and inquired as to
why we were crying. After we told her, she called Bobby into the coatroom and
told him that his red hair was ugly, and his freckles were too. While I am not
sure a child psychologist would have concurred with the teacher’s approach, it
worked for us because Bobby was crying now too.

This was the first time I really knew that I was different and that somebody
would be mean to me because of it. Consider the impressionable minds of
five-year-old children and the realization that skin color made Karen and me the
subject of disdain. My parents tried to explain what the word meant and how it
was used to denigrate “Negroes.” (Yes, I am old enough that we were still
referred to as Negroes.)

On that day, I changed from a carefree little girl to a cautious and insecure
one, not being sure when somebody might be mean to me again because of the color
of my skin. The realization that I might not be accepted by everyone—having to
think about it and consider it—was and is stressful and contributes to Black
fatigue.

It is not unusual for Black children to have life-transforming, aha! moments
such as my kindergarten experience. Sometimes in our diversity learning sessions
we ask the question, When was the first time you knew that you were different,
and what did it feel like? It is not uncommon to hear from Black and other
people of color that it was during participants’ formative years (ages 5–10).
Research shows that babies as young as six months old demonstrate a preference
for their own race.2

It was not so much the specific name-calling as it was the realization that I
was Black, different, not considered as good as, that was indelibly planted in
my mind and that my parents could not make me feel better about. I think I knew
I was Black; I just did not know the implications. You see, my parents were
Canadians, and not that they did not have their stories of racist situations,
but they did not have the US southern racial experience. Both of my parents’
ancestors used the Underground Railroad to settle in Canada, and my mother loved
her homeland much more than the United States, to the extent that she proudly
carried her green card until the day she died at age 57. If she had lived, my
parents were planning to go back to Canada after my father’s retirement.

My dad did not talk much about race, but my mother told me that the reason they
did not graduate from high school was that “colored” children were only expected
to matriculate to grade 9. My dad was born in the United States and was raised
by an uncle in Niagara Falls, Ontario, because his parents had died within
months of each other from tuberculosis. He served in World War II in a
segregated troop, married, and moved to the American side of the falls and
worked as a laborer for DuPont for over 40 years.

My stark awareness of my race just continued to escalate after my kindergarten
experience. My mother had cousins who lived in Baltimore, Maryland. We drove to
visit them from time to time. Every time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, my
mother would turn to me in the back seat and say, “Now you have to be good. Be
quiet and sit still.” This was even before the police stopped us, which happened
several times. They apparently saw the New York State license plates and a Black
man behind the wheel and wondered what we were doing out of state. They always
asked my dad, a very law-abiding, nondrinking, nonsmoking, pious Christian,
“Where are you going?” I was so scared by these incidents that one time I even
wet my pants. (I discuss the effects of race-based stress on children in chapter
8.) From the time I was five, being Black meant being on guard. As I read
accounts from other authors who are writing about their early experiences with
race, I find they are very similar to mine. So many Black and Brown people
learned early that the color of our skin rather than their skin mattered in ways
that frightened us not them and caused fear and stress.

Most of our vacations were spent in Canada with my mother’s family. She wanted
to visit as much as she could, so we spent most holidays and summer vacations in
Owen Sound, Ontario, about 110 miles north of Toronto. My aunt Frances (after
whom I am named) was quite an activist, fighting for civil rights for the
Saugeen First Nation of Indians to reclaim their land. I did not understand it
all then, but during our visits to Canada, she was often consumed with marches
and developing petitions and other legal documents. There were plenty of
discussions about racism in Canada at the dinner table with Aunt Frances, my
parents, and my uncles.

Other than the informal family discussions, I really knew very little about
Black history in grades K–7. There were only cursory mentions in elementary
school books, if any. In middle school, my best friend, Alnita, wrote an essay
on Sojourner Truth. Alnita was brilliant and a great writer. She had a way with
words even in the seventh grade. She read her essay in class and even the
teacher was speechless. Most students at that age would write about a famous
person in a very sterile, biographical fashion, but Alnita’s essay helped you to
feel the pain and suffering, as well as the determination and audacity of
Sojourner Truth. It was life changing for me for two reasons. First, I had never
heard of Sojourner Truth, and second, I could not have conceived that there was
a Black woman in the 1800s who challenged slavery and was an advocate for
women’s rights in such a fervent and visible way.

Alnita spurred my love of writing and my interest in Black history. I learned
that the NAACP had its roots in Niagara Falls. The Niagara Movement was a civil
rights group founded in 1905 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Scholar and activist W.
E. B. Du Bois gathered with a small group of supporters on the Canadian side
because they could not stay in hotels on the American side. The purpose of this
meeting was to form an organization dedicated to social and political change for
Black people in the United States. The group put together demands that included
an end to segregation and discrimination in unions, the courts, and public
accommodations, as well as equality of economic and educational opportunity.
While the Niagara Movement had little impact on legislative action, it led to
the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) in 1909.3 Learning this bit of history about my region was truly
exciting and motivated me to keep digging.

In high school, I was the editor of the school newspaper. This was the late
1960s and the civil rights movement was in full swing. I was writing about
Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X (that piece was banned because of the
widespread negative perception of him at that time), women’s rights, the Vietnam
War, and other social issues of the day. More times than not, my pieces were
edited by the teacher who oversaw the newspaper because she thought them to be
too controversial. It was frustrating and fatiguing to be censured.

In my senior year of high school, after I was accepted to the University of
Rochester, my guidance counselor suggested that perhaps that school was too
lofty a goal for someone like me. Sorry, my bags were packed. I was going and I
was going to show her (another stressor, feeling I needed to prove myself). When
I arrived at the university, there were 69 Black students (the previous year
there were only 10) out of a student body of about 5,000 undergraduates. There
was a two-tier set of admissions criteria for students of color—Equal
Opportunity Program and “regular admits.” I was a regular admit, meaning I did
not have to attend the summer program designed to acclimate students of color to
the university, but I was painfully aware that all of my professors assumed I
was a part of the Equal Opportunity Program, and there were clear biases and
signals that I/we did not belong. Regardless of my admission status, I know that
it was because of affirmative action that I received a full scholarship to the
university. My parents surely would not have been able to afford the tuition. I
am proud to proclaim that I benefited from affirmative action. Without it, I
know that I would not be where I am today.

The president of the university at the time said something to the effect that he
thought most Black students would do better at the community college. The Black
Student Union took over the administration building, demanding a retraction. I
was a part of that takeover. As a matter of fact, we held many demonstrations
and late-night meetings to bring light to the discriminatory behaviors that we
were constantly subjected to, such as security officers questioning whether the
students of color were really enrolled at the university. Sound familiar? In
2018 a white student called the police to report that a Black female was
sleeping in a common area of a dorm at Yale University. The white student was
concerned that she did not belong there, and it made her uncomfortable.4 It was
fatiguing to have to justify one’s existence while attempting to concentrate on
schoolwork.

Adding to my Black history acumen, upon arrival at the University of Rochester,
I learned that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman had run abolitionist
movement activities in Rochester, New York. Douglass printed his North Star
newspaper in the city, and Rochester was a part of the Underground Railroad.
Douglass is buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery, which is adjacent to the campus.5
One Halloween a group of students decided to try to find his marker. I cannot
even describe the feeling of knowing that these great freedom fighters walked
the same ground as me.

While my undergraduate days were fun, the racism was truly exhausting and
affected my ability to always be attentive to my classes.

Fifteen years after obtaining my bachelor’s degree and MBA from the university,
I was elected as the first African American female trustee. During my time as a
voting trustee, it was fatiguing to be the only Black person at many meetings
and to continually point out the lack of diversity at all levels of the
university and watch my concerns be minimized or dismissed. This is not meant as
an indictment of the university; I am sharing my experience. It is the history
of many universities in this country. The higher-education system has not
changed since my days as a student or a trustee. Chapter 3 provides a
then-and-now portrait of diversity in a number of aspects of society. The lack
of progress is fatiguing.


THE WORK WORLD

I started my work career in 1973, and affirmative action helped to jump-start
it. The Eastman Kodak Company, along with most Fortune 100 companies at the
time, was scrambling to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Executive
Order 11246, which was signed into law in 1965 and required not only
nondiscrimination in employment but also affirmative action. I was hired into a
management rotational program and landed in the affirmative action department.
My job was to defend the company against discrimination complaints. Working with
outside attorneys, I wrote “position papers.” Fresh out of undergraduate school
with degrees in psychology and English, I felt woefully underqualified for the
task. However, I was the token Black person that the company could showcase.
There was really no one else of color at a higher level to take on this role. It
was stressful and fatiguing because of the learning curve and feeling out of my
element but also because I did not always believe that the company had not
discriminated against the individual, or individuals in the case of class action
suits.

A few years later I was one of four “high-potential” employees selected for the
executive MBA program at the University of Rochester. The three others were
white men who were all promoted to vice president roles after graduation. I, on
the other hand, was asked what I wanted to do. I immediately selected a
high-level role, since my classmates had been appointed to such positions. I was
told by the head of HR that no such role was contemplated for me at that time. I
was assigned to competitive intelligence in marketing. It was a new department
(Kodak did not formalize a competitive process until the mid-1980s), and they
thought it would be a good move for me. I was assigned to study Fuji, Kodak’s
archrival. It was before the advent of the World Wide Web, so I had to do my
research the old-fashioned way—library and LexisNexis.

I worked for six months on the Fuji presentation for the executive team. Proud
of my super sleuthing skills and confident that this presentation would be my
ticket to a management position, I made my presentation. I basically told
leadership that Fuji would be a formidable competitor. It had plans to penetrate
the US market. I was asked to leave after my presentation while my boss stayed
behind (I did not rank high enough to hear the after-discussion). When he
returned to the office, he did not look happy. He said that he had to fight for
me to keep my job. The executive team did not believe my findings. They did not
think Fuji was such a threat—they believed that I had sensationalized the
presentation. I was shocked. Well, not to brag, but I was right. The Fuji blimp
appeared in US skies the next year, Kodak lost the advertising bid for the
Olympics to Fuji, and the rest, shall we say, is history. I do not know for sure
why my assessment was not deemed credible; I can only assume that who I was
contributed to their reaction. It was stressful and fatiguing.

The whole time I was in the corporate world, I did not know how to be. I had
bosses who told me I was too aggressive and others who told me I was not
aggressive enough. While sporting a short Afro hair style, I was asked whether
my hair would grow. When I said yes, I was told that I should let it because the
Afro was not professional. (Black women’s natural hair is still an issue today,
as discussed in chapter 6.) The stress of not knowing who to be or how to show
up so that I would be accepted led me to leave the corporate world to start my
own business.

It was fatiguing to be tokenized, be discredited, and not be allowed to bring
even half of myself into the workplace. The microaggressions (I will elaborate
on them in chapter 6) were so common that I think I became hardened to them. I
was miserable and often went home and cried about these experiences in the arms
of my very supportive late husband, Joe, whom I talk about later in the chapter.
The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for me was when I had a blatant
sexual harassment experience. I remained silent, but I could no longer stay in
that environment. I was fatigued.

While my experiences in the corporate world happened over 30 years ago, I
continue to hear the very same stories from young Black professionals today.

As you are reading this, you might be thinking, It seems like you did OK.
Affirmative action worked for you. And there is no denying that it did. This is
an example of a federal policy that enabled thousands of people of color at
lower socioeconomic levels to go to college. Programs inspired by affirmative
action are still helping people who would not otherwise be able to attain the
education they need to enhance their chances to achieve their life’s goals.
While data show that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of
affirmative action,6 people of color have also benefited, albeit to a lesser
degree. And many of these programs are being rolled back under the Trump
administration as unfair to white students. The Trump administration called for
abandoning Obama administration policies that allowed universities to consider
race as a factor in diversifying their campuses.7 This is a prime example of
“two steps forward and three steps backward.” It is fatiguing to have to
continue to fight for affirmative action—a policy signed into law in 1965. It is
fatiguing not to be able to have confidence that gains made based on such
programs are sustainable.


LIVING WHILE BLACK

As I researched and wrote chapter 4, “Racism Literally Makes You Sick,” memories
of my late husband, Joseph Winters, were in my mind. He, like me, was a
first-generation college graduate, coming from urban Washington, DC, in the
1960s. He had a degree in statistics and an MBA and worked as a director of
finance for Eastman Kodak. He died of a massive heart attack in 1997, at age 47.
He was diagnosed with coronary artery disease at age 38, after months of not
feeling well and having no tests performed to explore the possibility that his
shortness of breath and chest pain were related to his heart. When he was
finally diagnosed, the cardiologist said that he had suffered a heart attack
several months before; there was now significant heart damage and he needed a
transplant. In the meantime, we found a renowned heart surgeon who was willing
to perform quintuple bypass surgery in lieu of a transplant, which he really
could not wait for. He lived for nine years after the surgery. There were no
strong hereditary markers for heart disease in his family. I cannot be sure
whether the stress of being one of a few Black men at his level in a major
corporation contributed to his heart disease. I cannot be sure that, had he been
diagnosed sooner, the outcome would have been any different. I cannot be sure
that the reason he was not diagnosed sooner was related to racism. It is
something I still wonder about.

Joe and I produced two amazing offspring. Joe II is the tenured Alexander F.
Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African
American Studies with secondary positions in English and gender, sexuality, and
feminist studies at Duke University, and our daughter, Mareisha, is trained as
an electrical engineer but left the field as a result of many of the same
inequities that I encountered and that other women in STEM fields face. She has
served as chief operating officer at The Winters Group for the last eight years.
She has been instrumental in the company’s double-digit growth.

When Joe was 13, I came home from work one day to find a police car in the
driveway with my son in the back seat. I was very surprised and concerned. Joe
was a straight-A, mild-mannered young man and certainly never in trouble. The
police officer informed me that a parent of another student had filed a
complaint that Joe had started a fight with the boy on the bus. After receiving
more information, I learned that the other boy (white) had been bullying my son
for weeks. This account was corroborated by other students. The other boy
challenged my son to a fight. According to my son, the fight lasted all of five
seconds, and the other kid had a minor injury. I would have thought that the
other parent might have contacted me or Joe’s dad instead of calling the police.
The police officer found Joe at a neighbor’s house playing basketball. He
apparently had to search the suburban neighborhood, and my son would stand out
as the only Black boy. Joe was afraid, and so was I. When his dad got home from
work, we had the “talk,” which I explain in chapter 8. It is not uncommon for
spontaneous thoughts about his safety to still manifest for no apparent reason.
That incident happened almost 30 years ago, and we know that it could have just
as easily been today.

When Mareisha was 10, she begged for a dog. No one else in the family really
wanted a dog. We finally gave in, and on her eleventh birthday we surprised her
with a little brown-and-white shih tzu. He was too young to leave his mother, so
we eagerly anticipated his arrival in six weeks’ time. Two weeks before we were
to pick up Snickers, as he had been so named by Mareisha, I received a call from
the breeder. She said that we could no longer have the dog. I was shocked. I
could not imagine why. After doing some checking with the person who connected
us with the breeder, we learned that the breeder’s partner had discovered that
we were Black and refused to sell us the dog. There was no way that I was going
to tell an 11-year-old child that she could not have a dog because she is Black,
so I immediately went searching for a dog that looked like Snickers. I found
one, but the process was stressful and fatiguing. I tried to find some
organization that would address this blatant racism. It seems that because she
was an independent breeder, there was little recourse.

Again, the sad part is that this happened almost 30 years ago but could just as
easily have happened last week.


IN MY WORK

After almost four decades in the diversity, equity, and inclusion business,
there are thousands of stories that I might share. I have selected one that
happened in the course of writing this book that epitomizes the reason for Black
fatigue: a failure on the part of many white people to “get it”—to get how their
white identity represents the normalized dominant culture and abnormalizes every
other identity.

As part of a large professional services firm’s multicultural summit, I was
asked to be a breakout speaker on white culture and inclusion in the workplace.
In another breakout session, the Center for Talent Innovation presented the
findings of its most recent research on Black professionals in the workplace.
The first thing I noticed was that even though the summit of over 350 people was
very visually diverse, the Center for Talent Innovation breakout session of over
50 people was attended by only Black people, with the exception of two whites.
My session on white culture was also attended primarily by Black, Latino, and
Asian participants.

In my experience presenting at and attending many conferences over the years,
sessions on topics pertaining to Black people are almost always filled primarily
with Black people. We refer to this phenomenon as “preaching to the choir.”
After such sessions, attendees may feel affirmed by the opportunity to share
common experiences, but they also likely feel frustrated with the recounting of
the lack of progress. In the case of the Center for Talent Innovation study of
over 3,000 respondents, there were many data points that confirmed lack of
progress, such as the fact that black professionals hold only 3.2 percent of all
executive or senior leadership roles and less than 1 percent of all Fortune 500
CEO positions, even though we represent 12 percent of the workforce.

In my session on white culture, well-meaning white people in the room were
hard-pressed to know what to do, even though they were interested in the topic.
I shared whiteness theory concepts based on scholarly research that shows that
many white people see themselves as “raceless and cultureless.” A study by Pew
Research conducted in 2019 revealed that 75 percent of Blacks and over 50
percent of Latinx and Asians regard their racial identity as very important to
them, while only 15 percent of whites responded that their racial identity was
important.8 One of the young white men in the room said, “It’s true. My race is
not important. If it is not, how can I make it? I can’t feel something that I
just don’t.” I recommended that he start reading about the history of white
people and whiteness theory to get more grounded in the ideas. I suggest some
specific references in chapter 2. While most of the participants of color were
eager to support this young man’s learning, there were a few eyes rolling like,
Really? The sentiment voiced by a few was, “I don’t want to be your teacher, and
you should know what to do.”

It is fatiguing for me after all these years to hear about the same lack of
progress toward racial equity decade after decade and have white people respond
with the same ignorance or lack of interest in the topic or by not acknowledging
the profound impact of their racial identity. I sometimes do not know whether to
scream, cry, or just give up.


SUMMARY

Even with all the fatiguing experiences I have encountered because I am Black, I
am blessed. I benefited from the early affirmative action days when the powers
that be were afraid and wanted to avoid lawsuits. Even though I was the token in
many instances, it has likely been a lot easier for me than for other people of
color who did not get that boost. I know that I had to work at least twice as
hard to get where I am, and I am fatigued. However, I want to bring hope to the
generations that now hold the torch. When I hear millennials declare that they
are exhausted and not willing to be the educators of the ignorant, I am gravely
concerned. The inequitable systems will continue to be exhausting for
millennials and Generation Z (born after 1997) to navigate, whether they are
teachers or not. Black fatigue leads to all manner of physical and emotional
problems, many of which go undetected. Lifting the burden of being an educator
may lessen the day-to-day fatigue, but that alone will not dismantle racist
systems. As I shared in the introduction, maybe the 2020 global Black Lives
Matter protests against racism were a real wake-up call. No longer could white
people claim sublime ignorance of anti-Black racism.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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