A discussion of the term "minority" used to further disappear black Americans and the history, US history of violence that was slavery.

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I knew the beta blockers would help. For the last two years, I tried to explain to cardiologist what I was experiencing. Since 1973 to 2005, I was on a beta blocker, Inderal, for more than half that time. I was born with Wolff Parkinson White (WPW), and for the last twenty years, I've been off the drug. But, like most black Americans, I've been on the receiving end of indifference.

It's the Look. I have ten minutes, maybe fifteen. How do you feel?

I feel like a child and even hear myself sound like one as I try to explain the occasional chest pains, the irregular heartbeats, the fast beats while at rest, and the shortness of breath. And then the doctor turns from the screen to face me. It's the Look that tells me I should stay in my lane.

I suffered a Nstemi-Non-St-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction. Chest pains. Shortness of breath. I struggled to breathe. Doctor "Notes" from the past state that "she denies"-- everything that I stated I experienced: Chest pains. Shortness of breath. It's not that I wasn't heard; it's what I said that didn't matter.

I'm a member of the "minority".

I hate the term "minority" when it's meant to refer to non-whites in the US. It's all consuming and avoids looking at life beyond the prism of whiteness. "Minority" conceals the history of conquest, genocide, colonialism, and imperialism. In particular, it's avoiding any meaningful refection on American history as it relates to the existence and lives of black Americans. For there's a certain indifference reserved for black Americans. When whites look at black Americans an ugly past emerges, one that threatens to topple the racial hierarchy and the myth of innocence.

No one asked the African woman hunted down and caught like an animal what was her name. What's the name of her family's lineage? If her captors did so they would have to acknowledge an African with a name, family, community. They would have to recognize the humanity of Africans. Instead, the mother, grandmother, aunt, niece, daughter becomes "Jane" and "Mary" because a people powerful enough to capture human beings considered itself powerful enough to enslave them. The powerful, in turned, created whole narratives to defend the labeling of Africans as "subhuman". "Chattel".

It begins there in that indifference to the fact that we are human beings. It begins in the violence of terrorizing Africans despite, as Imani Perry writes, pleas from King Alfonso of Kongo, begging Portugal to stop "terrorizing" his people with the "prospect of being snatched and shipped to the New World". The "theft" of human beings continued "with abandon" even while there are so many of us spread across countless plantations, generating from our free labor wealth for a rising young new nation.

That we built this country is rarely mentioned!

The buying and selling of our bodies, the rapes of our ancestral mothers and aunts, and the subjugation to white supremacy is what I too see when I look at people who insist that I not mention the word, "racism". Someone like me who does so must be a racist!

A few days later, I returned home to my two cats, and the pounding, ceiling vibrator, and silly rocking motion of the white woman below. The woman intolerant of "noise". Or is it intolerant of me? That I have cancer, and recently suffered a mild heart attack is irrelevant to her. She has the power to fumigate my apartment for days when she doesn't bath. She has the power to call the police and report that I flushed a toilet after 10:00 pm. She has the power to demand by pounding that I go to bed at 10:00 pm. Turn off my laptop (no television or stereo) and go to the bedroom where I will be treated to grunting and moaning. Rocking. Why not? I'm not someone she need respect!

And this woman was a nurse!

Mentally ill she may be, but, towards me, she is cruel. It seems a caregiver assists her in her campaign to weed me out. Because race matters!

As for management, it depends on the "testimony" of two white women, friends of the former nurse below. One is up front, down the hall while the other is downstairs, up front. According to one, she has a familial connection to Supreme Court Judge Gorsuch and the other hasn't a racist bone in her body.

"How can we believe" writes Imani Perry, "what you say-- the claim that you don't have any racist bones-- when we've seen what you've done and said about us, to paraphrase Baldwin, even and especially when kindness comes belatedly after much contemplation and consternation?"

To paraphrase James Baldwin again, the subdued and the subduer don't speak the same language. Any attempt at dialogue between these guys and myself, as Baldwin observed, will breakdown.

I remember the closed ambulance door. Four young white men talking among themselves, occasionally asking me questions. I heard the word, "valve". Left and right valves. "Okay."

Okay!

I still couldn't breathe.

I see at least one of the EMTs answer by gathering the EKG reading and almost balling it up. I can tell by the way they are glances at each other as if I didn't exist that they say a minority on the stretcher and couldn't see the person in pain. The young men turned to technology for the truth because for them the technology doesn't lie. This minority claiming chest pains is another matter!

The door opened and the two firemen exit. There's a parked fire truck nearby. The door closes again. I want to follow. Leave! What happens if I just get out!

I hear an EMT ask if I ever had nitroglycerin? I heard myself answer in the negative and see a small pill coming toward me. I'm asked to open my mouth. An EMT behind me is recording that I'm being administered nitroglycerin followed by another a few minutes later.

I mentioned that I had an aneurysm in my aorta. Someone behind me chuckled.

And when hasn't it been stressful, doctor?

In the hospital room, a young white man enters. He glances at me too quickly. Returning his gaze to the screen on the cart he rolled in, he tells me that I have a pill to take. I asked the name of the medicine and why I had to take it. I heard something but noted that he was preparing the little medicine cup and the water.

I needed to hear from a doctor, I said to him. I'll have to take it anyway at home, he snapped back. Had I been thrown back to Benin or to the Kongo? Are we going backward, again? I insisted that I needed a doctor to explain what and why about this medicine, and he asked why I was refusing to take the medicine.

I asked for warmer blankets in an attempt to ignore his ignorance. I could feel an uptick in my heart rate. He could get me the blanket, he said, but I had to explain why I refused the medicine.

Are you 71?

And it seems he's using his high-tech skills to sum up my refusal-- in his words. With his back turned to be, he turned slightly in my direction. What does that mean?

PLEASE LEAVE!

What does that mean?

PLEASE LEAVE!

And finally he does. I feel my heart beating in my throat. It's quiet in the hallway. I imagine myself becoming more in focus for the majority white nurses. I'm an angry black woman now.

In walks a young white woman. She introduces herself as the supervisor, and asks me, why did I ask ______ to leave?

I don't have to explain anything to you! I'll need warm blankets.

I must answer her question first!

I asked her if she knew why I was admitted? I don't recall her response.

PLEASE LEAVE!

As she walked down the hall, I heard her tell her co-workers that I'll get the blankets, but later.

I didn't dare look at the blood pressure monitor!

A young man came in the room where I was bracing for further display of what I only could see. Then I heard a voice: not to worry! He understood. I looked up, noticed a smile. I smiled back. Not anyone's minority!

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.