In Between the World and Me, published in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that blacks live in fear of losing their bodies due to slavery, Jim Crow, and modern racial discrimination. Under these social institutions and violent practices, the latter of which continues today, society’s Dreamers, Plunderers, and Destroyers can take black lives with virtual impunity, all of which cause black folks to live in fear of losing their bodies. I disagree. I argue that the primary source of such fear arose in the earliest years of the infant’s life by parents, who abused, traumatized, and neglected their infants. Such abuse, traumata, and neglect, including emotional oppression, can constitute toxic stress. Once the infant’s stress response system has been repeatedly triggered, such abuse, trauma, and neglect can be an anlage of a death anxiety and learned helplessness in the neonate child and can cause them to associate rejection with abandonment, which is tantamount to actual or symbolic “death.” Thereafter, these children can live with a free-floating fear of death. The mechanism that triggers a “psychopathic” response in children or adult children can be racism, violence, or aggression in the primary (i.e., home), secondary (i.e., school) and tertiary (e.g., work) environments. As a reflex, especially to avoid the taboo subject of parents “killing” their infants and toddlers and to repress the scandalous truth of the mother’s (or caregiver’s) impulse to traumatically destroy their children, blacks conventionally assign this fear of death solely to white racism, America’s history of racial oppression, or racialized violence. However, by studying the neurobiological history of children, especially due to a parent’s abuse, trauma, and neglect of her infant and toddler, researchers have altered conventional wisdom about the probable origins of psychopathologies. Such abuse, trauma, and neglect, especially intentional violence from parent to infant, disrupt this vital relationship, in which parents cannot be separated psychologically and developmentally from their children. To the infant and toddler, this violent disruption can be foreboding doom, and anxiety of death that the child and adult child have learned to assign not to the actual experience of “violent” and rejecting parents, but to imaginary experiences of violence and death by whites that deny blacks access to the taboo subject of black caregivers who rely on violent, death dealing parenting styles and on their unconscious impulse to traumatically destroy their own children.