When American gymnast Simone Biles revealed her deep mental distress as she left the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, the invincible-seeming athlete launched a short-lived debate. Far from the idea of the body being all-powerful, she broke the taboo on mental health in the US.

Since Covid-19, a deep mental health crisis has been silently affecting the entire American population. But black women are twice as impacted by it and half as likely to get medical help as the rest of the population since they are far more stigmatized when they speak out about the challenges they face, as a long history of racism and violence has unfortunately left its mark. Specialists call the demand for strength and self-sufficiency that is imposed on women from historically mistreated communities the "superwoman syndrome."

Away from the medals, current events have shown us precisely the scale and permanence of the social madness that befalls those who let their guard down. On July 6, African-American Sonya Massey was shot dead by a white police officer at her home in Springfield, Illinois. Plagued by a psychotic episode, Massey had called law enforcement for help because she feared she was being robbed. The two police officers who arrived on the scene realized her mental distress, but after she appeared threatening, one of them announced that he "[would] fucking shoot [her] right in [her] fucking face" and did so.

This episode was yet another reminder that systemic police violence against black people has hardly abated since the death of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police in her home in 2020. After all, those who respond to mental emergencies are police officers and not medical services specialists due to a heavily security-oriented public policy that sanctions far more than it heals.

It fell to a third black woman to politicize this issue, inventing a narrative that does justice to Biles' triumph and Massey's tragedy. Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, seems until now to have chosen the familiar legal language of authority and order, that of an inflexible prosecutor against the "criminal Trump." As magistrate of the prison state of California, she enforced an ironclad criminal law and refused stricter supervision of police actions. It was only on the campaign trail in 2020 that she spoke out on the need to reallocate the budget reserved for police stations to community centers. Now more than ever, in the face of attacks from the Republican camp and misogyny, she must embody the sentence rather than the cure.

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