Where did you first come across Becker and Terror Management Theory, and how did it inform your research for your book?

When I looked for a reason for why Black criminality is seen as inherent and white criminality is seen as aberrant, I came across a body of literature talking about mass shooters and the ideology of white male mass shooters. It was equal parts terrifying and edifying to me, because I had no idea that a large part of their manifesto or way of life is that they feel that the country is slipping away from them, and that ownership and leadership is slipping away from them, and that if they don’t act quickly then their entire group will be annihilated.

And I was thinking, how would it ever happen that white people would cease to exist; they’re everywhere! Being the scholar that I am, I looked for more theory to find out: is it some media exposure that makes them feel as if their world is shrinking? Is it economic? Through which lens should I look? And that’s how I came across TMT, and I just became so fascinated with this idea that people want to feel important. They want to matter. They don’t want to feel like they were just here for a second, and then gone. Being part of a group helps with that. It helps people feel like they belong somewhere in a world where they maybe feel like they have lost their place. This need to feel like I am still in charge of the United States—I’m still the ruling class—this need creates violence, and always has created violence throughout history. I was trying to make those pieces come together and found that TMT was the perfect glue for that.

Can you talk about how awareness of one’s own mortality manifests differently for African Americans/people of color vs. white people in the U.S.?

When I watch for example old civil rights clips of Dr. Martin Luther King, or John Lewis, or any of these other icons, leading marches and being beaten, and things like that, I actually see my relatives in them—people who look like my uncle, my brother, who could have been there, and who could have been beaten. I also see it in those videos that circulate online so freely—George Floyd could be my dad, could be my uncle. I think that the threat of death is always with us [Black people] because we don’t see a separation with these folks as not being part of our family.

I don’t know if white people have that, but I know that most Black people feel like even though we’re not blood relatives, you’re still my brother, you’re still my sister. There is an old west African proverb—“I am because we are,” and it’s called ubuntu. I think that’s why Black people call themselves “bro” and “sis.” I can see somebody that I don’t know, just in the coffee shop, and be like “hey sis,” and she’ll go “hey,” and I don’t know that lady from anyone, but she’s my sister because she’s Black. And I think that that is something that is universal amongst most Black people.

This need to feel like I am still in charge of the United States—I’m still the ruling class—this need creates violence, and always has created violence throughout history.

That alone gives us a heightened awareness that we better be part of this movement, because it could be me next. In terms of some of my white friends who I have talked to, they don’t see themselves when they look at those same civil rights clips. They don’t see themselves as the oppressor. They kind of gasp and say, “How could anyone have done that?” They obviously don’t see themselves as the victim either. So it leaves them in this really strange position of: “I can kind of hop in and hop out of this movement when I feel like it, not because I’m a horrible person or anything, but because it’s not immediately concerning to me. I don’t feel at a visceral level that this affects me. I think it’s sad and I would love for it to stop, but I don’t really see myself as invested, or needing to be invested in that all of the time, because either it feels too big for me and it depresses me and I just want to move on, or when I do want to be in it, I want a fast solution to it because dwelling in it is going to make me feel even worse.”

For a lot of my white friends they were all about it, when George Floyd was first killed. They said, “What can we do?” Just a few weeks later, they were like: “I’m over it. I’m so depressed. I don’t want to hear about this anymore. I love you, but what can we really do about it. It [police brutality] looks like it’s here to stay.” And I had to tell them, if you guys are tired of hearing about it, we’re tired of living it. This has gone on long enough. For many of them, a lightbulb went off. They were like oh, you do have this imminent dread, this imminent sense of death that I don’t have, and because I’m not always fearful in the way that you are, it’s not as urgent to me. And I think that’s why the US Capitol riot scenes were so shocking, because a lot of the folks who were there have liberal cousins who were watching. Some white people know these folks—they know who did those things—a lot of them are related to them.

I think that the threat of death is always with us [Black people] because we don’t see a separation with these folks as not being part of our family.

It’s uncomfortable to talk about change when you’re talking about your dad, your cousin, etc. So again, in the way that Black people see themselves as the victim, I believe that white people can now see in the more radical far-right people like some of their own relatives. There is just a certain shame about that.

The same thing with cops. These folks are not just isolated bubbles walking around doing these things; they’re somebody’s husband, somebody’s dad, somebody’s brother. So, when we say all these things about how we want to reform policing, folks will get defensive because they’re like that’s my family member. They made a living for me. They have taken care of me with this job. You don’t know what they have to deal with every day. You don’t know how afraid we are for them every day. They may not come home every day.

Not many people can say that they have a job where they leave the house every day and they may or may not come back home. Police live with that every day. And so that’s why I think we’re at this huge societal stalemate because one group of Americans will say, I deal with the existential dread of my relative not coming home as a cop. The other group deals with the existential dread of just being Black. Where does that leave us? So that’s where I think a lot of TMT was so helpful to me.

Several journalists and researchers have commented that the heightened awareness of our mortality during the pandemic, combined with more time on our hands, motivated people to seek meaning and question their values, which led to more involvement in protests and activism after George Floyd’s murder. Do you agree with this analysis?

I think in order to really have any sort of existential epiphany, you have to be in a quiet place. I definitely think that people were seeking meaning when they participated, but it also had a lot to do with us being turned off and tuned out to noise. Due to COVID, we’ve had a collective quiet place to really mull over, what have I been doing? What is important to me? I think all of that really coalesced when we started to ask, when are things going to return to normal? And then when we said wait, getting back to normal for Black people is going to be dying underneath someone’s knee? Oh no.

And so that existential epiphany extends differently to different groups of people. We often focus on Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd but there were other officers present—just standing around watching—and not all were white. Anti-Blackness as a whole is a problem. It’s a different kind of discrimination. A lot of other ethnic groups started looking at their own biases after Mr. Floyd’s murder.

What TMT does is give us a really great lens through which to examine everyone’s fears.

For example, some of my friends are members of the Latinx community. They began to ask, do we have a colorism problem? Asian Americans started to email me to ask, what can we be doing better to help, because I know I have anti-Black sentiment. I had some really hard but great conversations with folks all over. I think Mr. Floyd’s murder really made people realize something that they had been trying to deny for a long time: Black people aren’t just complaining. We aren’t seeking special treatment. We really are treated differently from anyone else on the face of the earth, and violently so. No one could deny that anymore after last summer.

I think the uprisings made people have to figure out, which side of history am I going be on? Will I be on the one that is more inclusive and that really tries to ask hard questions and have tough conversations that make me uncomfortable? Or will I double down and refuse to have these conversations? It sounds crude but that’s really what we’re up against. Some folks just do not want to imagine what true diversity in this country should look like.

Looking forward, how do you see TMT continuing to shape our understanding?

What TMT does is give us a really great lens through which to examine everyone’s fears. One of the things my pastor says is that fear stands for “false evidence appearing real.” I used to hear him say that all the time and as I began to study these phenomena, that’s what I came to understand them as. A lot of this—I’m going to disappear, the country’s not gonna be mine anymore— is false evidence. Just because there is one person who has managed to crack a glass ceiling, doesn’t mean that an entire group is doing well. So even though we’re happy for Vice President Harris and we’re proud of Stacey Abrams and all these other trailblazers, we still know that Breonna Taylor did not get justice, among others.

which side of history am I going be on? Will I be on the one that is more inclusive and that really tries to ask hard questions and have tough conversations that make me uncomfortable? Or will I double down and refuse to have these conversations?

As a Black woman, I turned on the television on January 6th and looked at people who didn’t look like me rushing into the US Capitol and desecrating it. I was thinking, “No one is going to get injured here? No one’s even going to be arrested?” I saw more armed riot police respond to peaceful protesters in the early George Floyd protests than anywhere near the inadequate police presence on January 6th. To see those stark differences—that really stark response to Blackness—is so disheartening to Black people. Those are the kind of things that Black people live with.

I think that is why a lot of the phrases you hear on social media, like “Black Boy Joy,” or “Carefree Black Girl,” or “Black Girl Magic,” are concerted efforts to have happiness—because we know our lives may not be as long. And I think that that is why on the whole Black people appear so joyful. It has to do with the fact that we don’t know how long we have, and we may as well be happy and joyful in the time that we have, because we know now that no one is here to rescue us, we have seen that very few people will be punished when they harm us, so we have to make a conscious decision to rebel by being happy.