Susan Abulhawa: It’s unbearable to watch the videos this week of Alton Sterling, his widow, and their 15 yr old son; then, Philando Castile, bleeding barely breathing shot four times for a traffic violation, his girlfriend’s desperate pleas to God, her sobs, and, heartbreakingly, the little girl in the police car telling her handcuffed mother “it’s okay mommy. i’m right here with you.” This is more than police brutality. it’s a systemic infrastructure of white anxiety that scorches everything in its vicinity. it is matched only by a corresponding hyper masculinity, equally if not more lethal. No matter how clearly a black man speaks, how slowly he moves, how visible his hands, the mere fact of his presence – of his body – eclipses his humanity and provokes this foundational anxiety. It is somehow predicated on the fear of reshuffling of ingrained hierarchies; fear of a reordering of micro and macro world order; fear of not always being on the mountain looking down. It extends from the black male body to the female, to the brown, to those dressed in foreign traditional clothing, to those with accents, with beards, with turbans, hijab. To those in far away nations, to their schools, their highways and gardens and treasures. It’s all connected, we know it is. Intuitively we know that the murder of Alton Sterling selling CDs to earn a living is fundamentally connected to the burning of Libya, and to the live ammunition shot at Palestinian children regularly. And this is why, without unraveling and unpacking the web of deceit, notions of supremacy, insatiable appetites for power, and unmovable conscience, we can know that the collective fate of Black America as it relates to white anxiety is somehow a forecast for the fate of the rest of us.