Its a club no one wants to join, and yet there is no shortage of members. In fact, there were almost too many to count prior to the advent of cell phones and hashtags. But for every Emmett Till or Rodney King, thousands are not as known. Definitely not as known as Trayvon Martin , a 17-year-old Black teen, who, 10 years ago Saturday, was walking home from a convenience store when he was confronted and killed by George Zimmerman , a white Hispanic man who doubled as one part failed aspiring police officer and another part wannabe vigilante.

Trayvon joined a long list of Black women, men and children lost to senseless violence after being targeted for their race but in 2012, America was a vastly different landscape from just a few years prior. The first Black president was fighting for his second term, the 24/7 media machine was becoming more polarized and politicized, and social media was so ubiquitous that the court of public opinion could gleefully weigh in on the worthiness of Black people in real time.

Trayvon was among the first Black deaths due to racialized violence to become a trending topic on Twitter. Since then, there have been so many men, women and children who have died and gone on to become hashtags that I can rattle off the list of names like a fourth-grader practicing for a state capitals test.

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Ahmaud Arbery.

When the crime is being Black in the wrong place, it becomes too easy to wonder who is next. Someone I know? Someone I love? Me?

White-on-Black violence wasnt invented in the social media era, but one could argue its in the foundation of our nation. Four hundred years ago, white European settlers realized that after all but eradicating the Indigenous people of the so-called New World, they could ship in African peoples and have them do hard labor for free. Its been a violent cycle since then.

And like all cycles, its taken a toll.

A 2018 study found that Black people reported poor mental health in the three months after a police shooting.

Theres the recriminations on cable news and on Twitter. Theres the fights over the Thanksgiving dinner table, the speculations, the memes and the trolling. (During the grand jury hearing for Darren Wilson, someone tweeted at me a photo that was allegedly of Michael Brown with a gun, as if that was supposed to prove something. I thought the Second Amendment was sacred?)

What does marinating in a never-ending cycle of violence against Black people do to the brain? What has a decade of this toxic soup of anti-Blackness done to us?

The evidence is clear that discrimination matters for health, David R. Williams, a public health professor at Harvard University and one of the 2018 studys authors, said in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And it is not just what happens in the big things, like at discrimination at work or in interactions with the police. But there are day-to-day indignities that chip away at the well-being of populations of color.