With the name of Senatobia’s Police Chief, Harold Vanderford, returning to the news cycle due to his usage of a racial slur, European America faces another unwanted confrontation with race, racism and whiteness.
When Vanderford stepped into the leadership seat of the Senatobia Police Department in Mississippi, he was publicly positioned as a stabilizing force, a man tasked with "reestablishing and solidifying trust" in a municipality historically shadowed by systemic police abuse. Yet, the reality behind his office door tells an entirely different story. Private text records, exposed in the wake of the tragic police shooting of a 1-year-old Black toddler, Kohen Wiley, revealed that Vanderford routinely littered his private communications with the n-word. Across more than a dozen documented exchanges, he normalized hate speech with a level of casualness many white-bodied people find terrifying. In one message, he boasted about a "racist moment" on a public road; in another, he texted that he had "screamed" the racial slur 15 times while heavily intoxicated, explicitly hoping his neighbors would hear him. He described almost assaulting Black residents, used the word to dismiss Black collegiate athletes, and tossed the slur around as an everyday descriptor for himself and white peers.
The question becomes, “What kind of public pressure is needed to produce a reform movement among European Americans for European Americans?”
Since superheros are the new mythological references for our generations, the Marvel character, Winter Soldier, appears relevant here. Captain America's sidekick, Bucky Barnes, is brainwashed so well that all it takes for a purely psychotic alternative personality to emerge is hearing a specific string of words. Normally, he is an agent who moves through the world entirely unaware of his latent capacity for state-sanctioned violence until the activation code is uttered. Once triggered, the human being/personality dissolves, and the hyper-violent “asset” takes over, completely devoid of empathy, morality, or reason.
I do not know if former Police Chief Vanderford is a Winter Soldier but former Officer Sean Grayson fits this example perfectly.
Let's look at the events of July 6, 2024. A 36-year-old Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis and fearing a prowler outside her Springfield, Illinois home, named Sonya Massey called the police. Doing as Americans are trained to do, she did not take matters into her own hands, instead, she summoned the state to safeguard her life and property.
Grayson, a deputy with the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office and his partner, responded to the call, knocked on her door and was permitted entry into her living room. The environment was calm until a pot of boiling water on the stove became a focal point of attention. When Grayson instructed her to move it, Massey picked it up, noticed his sudden physical retreat, and uttered a spiritual phrase born of her faith: “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
That was the string of words. That was the activation phrase.
Instantly, Grayson’s human wiring collapsed into total state-sanctioned pathology. His response was immediate, feral, and absolute: “I’ll fing shoot you right in the fing face.” As Massey apologized and ducked for cover behind her kitchen counter, Grayson drew his firearm, closed the distance, and fired three rounds, striking her fatally in the head. (Of course,) he had failed to turn on his own body camera. We know what happened, step-by-step, because his partner’s camera remained active.
Throughout his court appearances and subsequent trial, Grayson displayed the ice-cold detachment of an operative whose code remained unexamined. Convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison, his defense insisted he was acting under a perceived threat. In court, as the Massey family wept, raged, and carried the crushing weight of public grief, Grayson offered no true accountability. Instead, he presented a sterile posture, refusing to acknowledge the profound inhumanity of his panic-driven execution of an unarmed Black woman in her own sanctuary.
The parallel between Grayson and the Winter Soldier becomes starker when analyzing his final plea to the state. Diagnosed with stage four colon cancer, a terminal illness that had metastasized to his liver and lungs, Grayson petitioned the Illinois Prisoner Review Board for early compassionate release under the state's medical parole laws. In his handwritten request, Grayson wrote: "While inside she attacked me with a pot of boiling water and I fatally shot Ms. Massey."
Notice the narrative framing. Much like Bucky Barnes attempting to explain away the corpses left in the wake of his Hydra programming, Grayson viewed himself not as a perpetrator of white supremacist violence, but as a victim of circumstances. He sought empathy from the system he served, begging for a dignified death at home surrounded by family. Yet, unlike Barnes, whose redemption arc involves a deep, agonized repentance for the lives he ended, Grayson remained entirely unrepentant. His written appeal doubled down on the internalized training that an unarmed Black body ducking for cover was engaged in an act of aggression towards his white body.
To their credit, the board unanimously denied his release, determining that he remained a threat and had shown no remorse. When Grayson died in prison serving his sentence, he died as the program dictated: trapped within the violent logic of a criminal system he willingly inhabited, unable to achieve the humanity required to ask for genuine forgiveness.
In a departure from Dr. King’s example of providing oppressors continuous forgiveness for their crimes, or emotional absolution, the Massey family chose not to do that in their press conference. Nor at the announcement of his death did they change their public stance towards him or their definition of justice denied.
When news broke that Grayson had succumbed to his terminal illness behind bars, the Massey family through their legal representation offered a clear, unyielding line. They expressed formal condolences for human loss, but refused to grant Grayson a posthumous absolution. They explicitly noted that his death in custody does not bring their family member back from death. They rejected the cultural demand historically placed on Black families to perform immediate, performative grace for the white bodies that destroy them.
My question becomes, “What is the effect on the general white-bodied psyche from witnessing this news cycle?” Just like it is theorized that Black people feel something communally whenever a Black body is destroyed at the behest of private white hands - see Nolan Wells - or murdered by police, a certain kind of grieving is observed within the Black population. What happens to one Black person seems to affect large populations of Black people. There is a communal effect. Isn’t this also true for European Americans? Or, in accepting the practice of individualism, are we choosing to collude in the practice of dehumanizing white bodies?
Let me make my point plain.
When a Black body is broken by the state or by vigilante hands, the Black community experiences a collective somatic rupture. It is a shared, ancestral nervous system response—a visceral understanding that the bullet fired at Sonya Massey or the slur spewed by Harold Vanderford is an implicit threat against every Black living room, every Black child, every Black space in America. The grief is communal because the terror is structural.
Does the white body feel a mirror vibration when they watch Grayson die in a prison cell or read Vanderford’s text logs? Or has the culture of white individualism acted as a psychic anesthetic? By viewing Grayson as merely a "bad apple" or Vanderford as an "isolated disgraced official," European Americans isolate themselves from the moral weight of the group culture. They treat these men as statistical anomalies rather than localized expressions of a systemic disease they equally share in. In doing so, do they strip these men - and ultimately themselves - of true human accountability? By hiding within individualistic isolation, does European America escape the collective grief, but also the collective transformation.
In the public mind, this far into the second Trump Administration, I interpret this response of “indifference” as a sign of attachment to white supremacy culture. It is a privilege to be able to completely ignore the news cycle and race not affect your life in any way, shape or form.
For the white body, the strategy is complete erasure. The ability to scroll past the murder of Sonya Massey or the exposure of Chief Vanderford without a spike in blood pressure, without a conversation at the dinner table, without an evaluation of local law enforcement budget allocations, is the ultimate manifestation of racial dominance. Indifference says: This does not touch my house. This does not alter my safety. This is an irrelevant footnote in my day. That indifference is not neutral; it is an active defense mechanism designed to keep the status quo comfortably intact.
In the public mind, the response of “outrage and defensiveness,” the choice to distance yourself from the racist actions of other white-bodied people, is also seen as an attachment to white supremacy culture.
This is the performative posture of "not all white people." When the liberal, conservative or apolitical white body witnesses Grayson’s brutality or Vanderford’s overt bigotry, the immediate emotional impulse is not deep introspection, but rapid self-exoneration. They flood social media with performative horror, loudly proclaiming, “I could never be like that!” or “This is not who we are!” But this defense mechanism is simply another way of avoiding the work. By creating an artificial moral boundary between "good white people" and "monstrous white officers," they shield themselves from examining how they actively profit from, uphold, and reproduce the very institutions that produced Sean Grayson and Harold Vanderford. The outrage functions as a cloak; the defensiveness functions as a shield.
It appears there is resistance within the entire population of European America to address racism as it presents itself in this lifetime. This is despite the population being hyper-aware, thanks to social media, that a problem exists.
We live in an age of total exposure. The high-definition body camera footage of Sonya Massey’s final seconds is accessible to anyone with a smartphone. The verbatim text transcripts of Harold Vanderford yelling slurs in his living room are published across national news platforms. Ignorance is no longer an available defense. Yet, despite this hyper-awareness, structural paralysis remains absolute. European America sees the horror, processes the visual data, and then collectively freezes.
This leads to a terrifying conclusion put forth by Resmaa Menakem in his book, “My Grandmother’s Hands.” The idea is this: white bodies are soothed by racial violence, speech and cultural events. Because of the economic stress many are feeling, the actions of Grayson and Chief Vanderford are necessary, otherwise, the murder/suicides that we see happening within white families would be greater.
Menakem’s thesis forces us into the darkest corners of racial somatics. He posits that whiteness, as a constructed system of body-centered power, carries an immense, unaddressed burden of intergenerational trauma and systemic angst. When economic security crumbles, when political instability rises, and when the internal pressures of hyper-individualism fracture the white domestic sphere, that internal trauma must discharge somewhere.
If it does not discharge outward against Black and brown bodies, it turns inward. The public execution of a Black person by an officer of the law, or the public assertion of unchecked white male dominance through racial slurs, acts as a subconscious pressure-relief valve for the white collective psyche. It re-establishes order. It re-affirms who holds the ultimate power of life and death. It provides a brief, grotesque sense of somatic soothing. A reassurance that, no matter how chaotic the world feels, the hierarchy remains firm. The violence directed at Sonya Massey is not an accident of policing; under this framework, it is a functional requirement for the psychological stability of white supremacy.
Because I live in a Black body, I don’t have answers for how the white body feels right now, all I have are questions and the ability to facilitate a fruitful discussion that can lead to valid and viable answers.
We must stop treating police violence and institutional racism as mere political debates or policy failures. They are somatic, cultural, and spiritual crises rooted deep within the European American collective consciousness. Until white Americans begin to interrogate what happens inside their own nervous systems when they see Sean Grayson pull that trigger, or when they hear Harold Vanderford speak those words, the cycle will simply repeat.
The task of dismantling this pathology cannot fall on the Black bodies that are continuously broken by it. It requires European Americans to abandon the comfort of indifference, step past the shield of liberal defensiveness, and face the horrifying truth of what whiteness costs - not just to Black people, but to their own humanity.
Kokayi, it's complicated. I agree these are definitely "localized expressions of a systemic disease they (we whites) equally share in." I share the disease for sure.
For me it's not a psychic anaesthetic, rather I feel huge grief on hearing of Grayson murdering Sonya Massey, Vanderford's hate speech and the many other horrors of these times.
Among us White people I think there's degrees of deconstruction. While I don't try to self-exonerate as much as I used to, neither am I as proactive about challenging racism as I would like to be. One step at a time and I know it will be a lifelong road.