Black, British, Anxious: A 2021 Guide to Black Anxiety

Warning: this post can be triggering, but we felt it important to share it exactly as the author intended it to be read.

I’ve only ever had one panic attack.

I was 16. I was on my way to a college I quite dramatically hated. It took me to the outskirts of London. I could count on one hand and an extra finger the people that looked like me. Having made no friends in the few months I’d been there, I’d already started slipping in and out. I was barely there, and late when I was. Life had become more complicated and strained than I was used to. And I always seemed to think everyone was laughing at me. The train had stopped between stations, five minutes away from the college town.

Nothing was out of the ordinary. The level of dread was relatively the same as it always was. And then suddenly my heart felt like it was trying to burst through my chest. I was late. I didn’t often care about disrupting my class. But I was sweating. My throat was tight and I could barely breathe.

I called my mum. I told her that something bad was happening to me and I didn’t know what it was but I needed to come home. She told me to press forward, that my absences had already been flagged, letters had been sent home and worrisome calls had been made by my academic supervisor, Tom. The college was a good one. You’ll be fine once you get into class, she cooed, sensing the tears in my voice, but you have to go in today love.

The undercurrents of anxiety in being friendless and shy in a new environment was likely the cause of such an ‘out of the blue’ bout of panic. So was being Black and suddenly planted into a white space, surrounded by people that couldn’t and wouldn’t understand. It was a contributory factor in the panic attack I suffered that morning, but the implications of being Black are enough to trigger a relationship with anxiety.

***

2020 was a year for Black people. The idea that we’re far more likely to lose our lives as a result of our race was made into even more of an inarguable fact. New stories of the austerity that disproportionately ravages Black British communities and its impact on our mortality rate embedded themselves in our news media. We’re four times more likely to die from Coronavirus than our white counterparts, the national office of statistics found in spring, observing that socioeconomic inequalities play a sizable role. Though it’s said more research is needed to cement the link, a study that found Black Britons are around five times more likely to be murdered suggested the same. Unite all of this with 2020’s Black Lives Matter movements which triggered a resurfacing of buried racial trauma. You now potentially have inspiration for both the development and enhancement of Black anxiety.

There’s little known about how many of us are weighed down by anxiety, whether preordained by the negative implications of our race, or enhanced by them. It’s a component of mental health under narrated by the Black people who know it well. Much of what’s been uncovered about Black mental health in recent years has considered depression and psychosis as focal points in studies. The black hole of anxiety - as equally justified by our racial experiences as the former, is largely uncharted territory. When better to fill in these gaps in understanding then now?

Defined

It’s difficult to choose an entry point into such a broad conversation. However, beginning with an understanding of racism’s ability to inspire anxiety within black communities isn’t a bad place to start.

“Individuals respond to situations differently.” Julie Baah, an NHS psychologist and mental health practitioner states. “Some people manage life with some level of normality, whilst others understandably find their mental wellbeing impacted severely after a traumatic event.”

“These experiences can affect levels of stress, anxiety and fearfulness, as well as self-esteem.”

The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as ‘an emotion characterised by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.’

For those of us that find ourselves more prone to the crippling mental impact of racism, anxiety can reveal itself in different ways. It can account for a range of behaviours, from the feeling of ‘worry’ that we traditionally associate with it, to stringent ‘self-monitoring’ - a psychology term that describes a management of how a person expresses and presents themselves to others. For some Black people, racially charged anxiety could look like the adoption of a certain set of behaviours. There could also be a dissociation from behaviours stereotypically associated with Blackness, in hopes of avoiding further instances of racism. But the severity of the way the anxiety feels too can vary, Bahh confirms.

“It may be a feeling of being more on edge for some people. For others, it may be a higher sense of fearfulness or distress.” She says. “A common explanation of anxiety is our bodies and minds responding to something that appears dangerous. If we use this explanatory model, it is understandable why some people may feel avoidant, on edge, or mentally preoccupied with worry when they are experiencing ongoing racism.”

“It is important that each feeling is validated, whether it is seen as less or more severe.”

This severity can also be impacted by the number of instances of racism a Black person endures.

“Multiple exposures to traumatic incidents, including racism, can be detrimental to a person's mental wellbeing. For some, the psychological impact of experiencing multiple traumatic incidents may be more multi-layered and long-term.”

The Age of Black British Anxiety

The endurance of racism is long term. It’s widely considered par for the course, well-lodged into the Black experience, occurring with and without an audience. The events of 2020 happened against the backdrop of immobilisation, in a world filled with people with nowhere else to look. The zeroing in on the true extent of racism’s ramifications may have initiated a new anxiety in some of us, but for many Black people, the same old song continued to loop, Baah suspects.

“I think the sudden increased acknowledgement of police brutality and murder and the racial inequalities of COVID-19 have just highlighted on a broader scale what many Black people already know and experience.” She says. “A lot of inequalities have stayed consistently poor and fatal even though there have been campaigns and initiatives prior to the COVID pandemic and BLM.”

Read the full piece here.

Words by Abigail Scantlebury (@abigail.scantlebury)

Image by Mimi Koku.