When Silence Finally Breaks — and Who It Was Protecting All Along

Jan 15
4 min read

The killing of Renee Goode is devastating. It is violent. It is unjust.And it should never have happened.

But to understand why this moment feels so explosive — why it has sparked outrage, protests, and fear across communities — we have to tell the truth about something deeper. The most dangerous silence in America has never come from Black people.

It has come from everyone else.

Black communities have been speaking about harm at the hands of law enforcement and authority for generations. Black mothers have raised their voices, buried their children, organized, marched, warned, documented, and pleaded. The issue has never been a lack of testimony. The issue has always been a lack of belief.

If America had believed the Black American experience when it was first named, we would not be here now.

Silence Was Never Ours

When Black people experience trauma at the hands of authority, the response has been painfully predictable: disbelief, justification, deflection, and eventual disengagement. Not silence from Black communities — but silence from those who had the privilege to look away.

When Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home, Black communities spoke.

When George Floyd was murdered in the street, Black communities spoke.

What followed was not sustained protection or structural change. It was conditional outrage. Empathy with an expiration date. A slow return to comfort for those whose safety was never truly at risk.

That option — the option to disengage — is the silence that has always mattered.

Who Gets to Be Loud — and When

What we are witnessing now is not a new problem. It is new proximity.

As enforcement expands and fear moves beyond the boundaries it has historically lived within, people who once felt insulated are now feeling exposed. And suddenly, the warnings Black Americans have been naming for years are being treated as credible.

Now there are protests.Now there is urgency.Now there is disbelief.

And for Black communities — especially Black mothers — this moment carries a familiar grief: We tried to tell you.

This is not about minimizing Renee Goode’s murder. Naming this truth does not diminish her life or her death. It honors it. Because her killing did not happen in a vacuum — it happened in a country that repeatedly ignored early warnings about unchecked authority until the threat felt personal to more people.

Belief was delayed. And delay has consequences.

Belief Is Not Symbolic — It Is Preventative

Belief is not just about validation. It is about intervention. When lived experience is dismissed, systems remain unchecked. When warnings are ignored because they come from marginalized voices, harm does not stop — it spreads. It moves outward until it reaches people whose fear is finally taken seriously.

The cost of disbelief has always been paid in Black bodies.The difference now is who feels vulnerable. For Black mothers, this moment is layered with anger, grief, and exhaustion. Not because others are speaking up — but because it took shared exposure for Black truth to be heard.

The Ripple Effect of Ignored Truth

When trauma is consistently dismissed, it does not disappear. It embeds itself — in bodies, families, and communities.

Clinically, this shows up as:

Chronic hypervigilance and anxiety
Emotional numbing and fatigue
Depression rooted in helplessness
Deep mistrust of authority and institutions

On a community level, it fractures trust. People stop sharing their experiences because history has taught them that telling the truth does not guarantee protection — it often invites scrutiny instead.

For Black mothers, the unspoken question lingers:If this can happen to her, what does that mean for me? For my daughter?

That question is rarely given space. But it lives loudly beneath the surface.

Breaking Silence Requires Accountability — Not Just Volume

Silence does not end because people get louder. It ends when people are willing to confront what their silence once protected.

Healing — individually and collectively — does not begin with protests alone. It begins with reckoning: acknowledging that belief was withheld until safety felt personal.

Collective healing requires listening without debate, validation without conditions, and the humility to admit that Black Americans were telling the truth long before others were ready to hear it.

Clinical Reflection: Trauma, Silence, and Collective Avoidance

From a clinical perspective, what we are witnessing is not delayed empathy — it is collective avoidance breaking down.

For many non-Black communities, silence functioned as distance. It allowed danger, grief, and moral responsibility to be psychologically outsourced. That distance offered nervous system protection — but at the expense of others’ safety.

Black communities did not have that option.

Chronic exposure to state violence, paired with repeated invalidation, creates trauma rooted not only in fear, but in erasure. When warnings are ignored long enough, silence becomes evidence — revealing whose experiences are considered credible and whose are not. Healing does not come from demanding voice from those who have always been speaking. It comes from restoring belief, accountability, and shared responsibility.

Until the Black American experience is treated as truthful without corroboration — without proximity — these cycles will continue. Only the faces, neighborhoods, and headlines will change.