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The only thing that kept Jodi-Ann Burey sane this summer was binge-watching Hoarders. Within three weeks she was done with all 10 seasons.
The show helped her escape from the “visceral sadness” she was feeling as a Black woman in 2020. For Burey, this year has been draped in trauma — from the string of police brutality incidents, to the everyday acts of racism that showed up in her own life.
The day before Christian Cooper’s video of a white woman calling the police on him in New York’s Central Park went viral, a white man at a Walgreens in Seattle threatened to call the cops on Burey after they got into an argument over who was or wasn’t stepping aside as they were leaving and entering through the same door.
“I was trying to hold myself from the brink of an absolute meltdown,” Burey told OneZero. And then, at the same time, there were the messages.
Every day for weeks, white women she knew (and didn’t know) emailed, texted, called, and DM’d her. They needed to let her know how bad they felt about the police killings. They wanted to make sure they had never hurt her inadvertently. Some wanted her approval on what they were doing to be an “ally.” One LinkedIn follower went so far as to ask her to edit a LinkedIn post about their allyship, while a former colleague she rarely spoke to simply texted, “Hi Jodi-Ann, I wanted to see how you are feeling.”
It was “a whole season of ‘contact a Black person that you know,’” after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, said Burey.
But the worst case might be the white woman Burey had considered a friend who “checked in” with a phone call for the first time in years — despite knowing Burey had cancer.
“In 2018, I spent most of that year not being able to walk,” she said. “That wasn’t enough for her to reach out to me… [but] when some random Black man died?”
When Burey told her friend Caitlin Lombardi about handling these messages on top of everything…
