In Memory of All the Unarmed Black Men Who Have Died at the Hands of Police Officers

Once I watched a grown man in a business suit leap out of his subway seat with fear and surprise at the sight of a lone purple grape rolling down the floor of the train car headed toward his feet. I can only assume that out of the corner of his eye he saw something more threatening than a grape. Perhaps he thought it was a mouse, or perhaps he knew it was a grape, but a traumatizing experience with fruit from his past triggered a fearful reaction causing him to jump up and run away.

We all have our purple grapes: stimuli in our lives that trigger our Fight/Flight/Freeze responses, because they are associated with some past experience where, real or not, we perceived our lives as threatened. Fight/Flight/Freeze (FFF) is seen all throughout animals in nature, and even though we modern day humans rarely need to fight, run, or play dead to save our lives as we once did when we lived out in the open with other animals who saw us as prey, we still often feel as though that were the case.