With a month left before the presidential election, Donald Trump and JD Vance have doubled down on racist attacks of Haitian migrants, leading to bomb threats against schools with Haitian children. Trump has continued to villainize Black immigrants and amped up his racist rhetoric towards Kamala Harris.
The continuous and constant assault on the Black psyche goes beyond rhetoric or benign statements. For many Black people, these racial stereotypes impact access to skilled jobs, education, and healthcare across every sector of our society, and these racial stereotypes mark the DNA across generations.
We have scientific evidence of the impact of racism on accelerating death in Black women, yet we have no legal precedent to stop this new form of biological internal lynching and beating down of the DNA of Black people. There is an absence of responsibility given the scientific evidence that shows that racial stereotypes (perpetrated by individuals and the systems they occupy) shortens our lives as Black people. We need legal precedent to address biological lynching. We have enough scientific evidence to show that for many Black people, the internal biological condition is bruised, beaten, and dying because of racism.
To be sure, the damage to the DNA of Black people is not visible like marks on the beaten back of enslaved people in public spaces. The invisibility of biological lynching makes it more dangerous in many ways. If you can’t physically see the assault, then you have no way to accuse the perpetrators of the assault. Yet, through science the bruises have become visible and we need only look at the evidence. The violent nature of the damage caused to Black people cannot be overstated – we see physical changes in brain cells, high cortisol levels through chronic stress, weathering of the body, shortening of the telomere length on the DNA, a compromised immune system. The Haitian immigrants are worried about their physical safety, canceling town hall meetings in their community. But, even more long lasting once the acute physical threat has dissipated is the biological mark left behind, many times invisible even to the bearer.
Racism and discrimination marks our DNA, and can be passed onto the next generation. It often creates a sense of post-traumatic stress disorder, and keeps many Black people in a heightened sense of anxiety. This continuous stress state wears down our immune system, and ultimately accelerates the onset of death. It is a silent killer for many Black people – silent to the world but loud in the bodies and minds of victims of racism.
While there are federal laws prohibiting discrimination including one passed on September 24, 1965, by Lyndon B. Johnson: an Executive Order prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, and national origin. Our federal laws still fail to address and alleviate the internal biological harm resulting from racism.
As a nation, we must translate the scientific evidence of the deleterious effects of racism into laws that safeguard against the biological lynching of Black bodies as we attempt to do this for ongoing physical lynching of Black people such as in the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The U.S. government has an obligation to protect the health and wellbeing of Black people as full citizens and full humans. The current laws and application of laws about racial discrimination fall short and delay justice for Black people. To properly account for the robust scientific evidence of the increased mortality caused by racism, we need collective action to stop the assault on antiracism initiatives protecting Black people. We know smoking in closed public spaces can have negative effects on people, therefore smoking is banned in closed and in some cases open public spaces such as parks.
Our government is responsible for generating laws that account for the biological effect of smoking on the internal biological condition of people. We cannot completely ban smoking, just like we cannot completely ban racism, but we can enact laws that eliminate smoking from inside hospitals, restaurants, and other public spaces. Similarly, our laws about racial discrimination need to work towards eliminating the deleterious effects of racism in domains meant for the public good.
Public health experts, especially Black scholars, need an organized and more cohesive effort to leverage and translate the objective scientific evidence of racism and its deleterious effects on our DNA into laws that safeguard our health. Our mortality and morbidity – physically, genetically, and psychologically — will depend on enacting laws that combat the current assault on Black people at a biological level. There is a legal obligation of the country to protect its citizens and when it fails to do this, there needs to be new laws developed to safeguard the physical wellbeing of disenfranchised communities.
More Black people should engage in legal suits of entities that are seeking to shorten our lifespans and injure our lineage through racism related biological injury.
While the attacks on the Haitian immigrants have happened on a national public platform, for many Black people, racism is a silent killer through daily micro- and macro- aggressions. Ongoing racism is killing many Black people, and we need to go after the perpetrators for the moral and ethical health and wellbeing of the nation. Racism kills Black bodies but it also destroys our collective soul and sense of community as a nation.