We CAN Breathe: Resisting the Effects of Racism with Deep Breathing
By Katara McCarty, coach, author, founder and creator of EXHALE app
Black, Indigenous and Women+ of Color (BIWOC) experience oppression every day. From microaggressions like strangers reaching out to touch our hair to explicit anti-blackness, we are chronically bombarded with racial trauma. This stress means we are almost always preparing for battle through fight, flight or freeze mode, which creates constant tension on our mental and physical health.
What if there was a secret weapon always available to calm us in stressful situations? A free and powerful tool that is always available to fight off stress, anxiety, and trauma? Well, there is, and it’s in our breath.
The Power of Deep Breathing
When we feel overwhelmed as children, our parents tell us to “just breathe” or “take a breath.” Other than being told to do it, though, we’re never taught why breathing is supposed to calm us down. According to the American Institute of Stress, deep, abdominal breathing reduces stress and anxiety. For just 20–30 minutes each day, “deep breathing increases the supply of oxygen to your brain and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes a state of calmness.”
Our parasympathetic nervous system is where our body should be during downtime, which should be 80% of the time. It’s the natural state we should be living in when not in danger. Our heart rate slows down, our breath is calm and relaxed, our digestive system is stimulated, and our hormones are balanced.
Yet Black, Indigenous, Women+ of Color are often living in what the body perceives as danger due to racism and other forms of oppression. Our breath is short, we’re poised to fight, flight or freeze, and it is making us sick. It is imperative that we tap into our secret weapon, our breath, to reduce stress, tune into our parasympathetic nervous system, and heal.
Reclaiming Our Power
When we are experiencing stress and anxiety, we can use the power of our breath to come back to a state of calm. Tools that provide guided breathing techniques and mediations help individuals harness our breath to inhale calm and exhale stress and anxiety from the body.
Taking the time for ourselves and focusing on our breath as BIWOC is both an act of reclaiming our power and an act of resistance. We may not be able to control what’s happening to us outside of our homes, the daily microaggressions and racism we’ll face, but we can control our breath. Our breath is in the moment, now, and we can use that breath to ensure we’re not holding the oppression we experience in our body. Deep breathing becomes an active tool to resist the effects of racism.
This can be a hard practice to begin. The predominant cry of Black voices, spurred by Eric Garner and George Floyd, is “I can’t breathe.” Racism is strangling us, even as we are living through a pandemic that targets our respiratory system. COVID-19 is disproportionately killing Black Americans by affecting the very organs that allow us to breathe on our own.
When so many of our brothers and sisters cannot breathe, the act of taking a breath, of carving out space for us to say, “Yes, I will breathe. Yes, I can breathe,” is an act of resistance against the systems and individuals and unseen diseases that cut our breath short. Breathing calms us and brings us back to neutral, which not only gives us the opportunity to heal, but to continue to fight for ourselves and our community.
