The Ritual of Fear

The Ritual of Fear is Austin’s name for the recurring vigilance Black families use to protect loved ones in a world where ordinary encounters can carry the threat of racialized violence. It begins with a teenager’s fear that her cousin Dalin will leave home armed and not return, then widens into the calls, warnings, and imagined dangers that shape adult family life. The ritual is not a cure for danger; it is a practice of care performed under conditions that make safety uncertain.

The Fear Takes Shape Around Dalin

Austin traces the feeling to a family gathering when Dalin, her cousin, explained that he and his friends had been held up at gunpoint after he bought new sneakers. They did not carry weapons, so he handed over the bright white shoes. When their grandmother asked what he intended to do, Dalin answered that he was looking for a gun so he could get them back. His cracked knuckles and blunt response made the possibility of his leaving feel immediate.

Austin and her grandmother stared at him in horror. Austin understood that the shoes mattered, but that the threatened response was also about pride: the affront of being treated as though a stranger’s life mattered less than a pair of sneakers. She reads Dalin’s anger as a wish to right a wrong and regain control, safety, and authority over what happened to him. Her account holds the material loss and the injury to human dignity together rather than reducing his reaction to either one.

Dalin’s face, as Austin remembers it, held both anger and sadness. The encounter taught her that the rules governing his life differed from those governing her own. She believed that going to the police was not a viable option for him, while she had never had to imagine where she might obtain a gun or whom she would ask. His world had previously been familiar to her mainly through headlines; believing his description made her afraid for him. She wanted him to live. The danger was averted that night because their uncles intervened, but the fear did not end with that intervention.

Safety as a Family Practice

As an adult, Austin describes the fear through specific possibilities attached to the people she loves. She worries that her father may not make it home while traveling through rural Ohio for work, that her brother’s intellect will not protect him from being presumed a criminal, and that her husband may be mistaken for someone else. She also fears being unable to protect her son once he is no longer hidden within her body, and fears that the state may violate her own body. These are anticipations, not accounts of those harms occurring; their force lies in how racial danger enters the imagination before anything happens.

A drive across Michigan makes that anticipatory labor especially concrete. When her husband, Tommie, goes to visit his parents, Austin tries not to picture him being pulled over and frisked, or becoming angry and speaking in a way that could put him at risk. She does not want to pass her anxiety to him. Before he leaves, she hugs him, tells him to be safe, and asks him to promise he will come back. He says he will be fine and will call when he arrives. Austin nods and smiles, pretending to feel reassured.

The couple’s calls are part of that same practice. Austin calls Tommie when she arrives somewhere and again when she is leaving. White friends notice the habit; she senses their amusement and understands that they interpret it as inseparability or as a sign that he is demanding. Their reading misses the point. For Austin and Tommie, these calls are rituals for staying safe outside the home, a way to push back against fear without pretending the risks have disappeared.

From Private Vigilance to Collective Fear

The chapter’s title makes a family’s habits stand for a much wider experience. Austin extends the fear beyond her own household to Black parents, siblings, couples, and communities. It includes the possibility that white people will react with suspicion—clutching purses in elevators or locking car doors when a Black person walks by—and that police will assume danger where there is a mistaken suspect or an unarmed person. In this account, being perceived as guilty can bring the consequences of guilt, while an ordinary mistake or act of adolescent risk-taking may carry deadly stakes.

The fear also attaches to children’s imperfection. Austin insists that parents still want their children to live when they are rude, disrespectful, or wrong, and when a sixteen-year-old’s judgment leads to risky behavior. The wish is not conditional on a child being faultless. That insistence exposes the cruelty of a social order in which a young person’s mistakes may be met not with ordinary correction but with extrajudicial, deadly consequences. The ritual repeats because love cannot guarantee protection, yet refusing care is unthinkable.

Historical Roots and Narrative Significance

The chapter’s domestic scenes sit within the book’s broader argument that racial injustice was deliberately constructed, not produced by harmless misunderstandings or an accidental failure to progress. Austin links the history of slavery to mass incarceration, describes the sanitizing of the Civil War and the violence of Jim Crow, and argues that white power retained the ability to control, humiliate, and harm Black people without consequence. Her account of the Ritual of Fear gives that history an intimate scale: systems and inherited beliefs become the phone call before a drive, the watchful goodbye, and the fear that a loved one may not return.

That continuity appears again in Austin’s response to Ferguson. Watching Black residents face police equipped with riot gear, dogs, tear gas, and tanks, she sees a present-day confrontation that recalls the images in her history books. She had encountered the idea that racism evolved, but the militarized treatment of Black residents made the past seem less transformed than repeated in a new form. The chapter’s fear is therefore not simply personal anxiety; it is a perception shaped by history and by visible contemporary force.

The title also resonates with Austin’s later account of hope. She does not expect racial equality to arrive within her or her descendants’ lifetimes, yet describes continuing to speak, write, love, and work toward a world not yet seen. The Ritual of Fear and this persistence are not opposites: both arise from knowing that safety and justice cannot be assumed. One describes the vigilance demanded by danger; the other names the decision to keep acting and loving despite uncertainty.