Place yourself in this moment.
Your son has been stopped by law enforcement while driving your vehicle. As his mother and to the best of your knowledge, he has done nothing wrong. Your son is on the phone with you. You are telling him to comply; you are telling him to have the officer speak to you and you will explain things.
But it never got that far. What you heard was the commotion that followed. What you saw was your dead, black son lying over on the passenger seat, shot and killed by police over an expired registration.
Not a fabricated story. No made up details. Simply what happened to a young man named Daunte Wright. Another dead African American at the hands of law enforcement.
The fact is, Daunte Wright’s killing is one of over 260 police killings that have taken place in just the first three and a half months of 2021. It happened less than 10 miles north of the now completed trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer responsible for the death of George Floyd.
In the past –
I recoiled when I heard POC (person of color) organizations speak of their disdain of the police. Because I was raised
White
Secure
Good schools start to finish with resources and access to all services needed to raise a child
Police persons, firefighters – they’re city helpers – right?
As we are clearly aware – this is not the case for many POC today. And my feelings have totally changed.
Let’s talk about schools:
Segregation or inequity in school resources is not healthy for any of us – not whites, not people of color. Children and youth in these schools do not gain the experience needed in navigating diverse environments – experience that they need as adults when they have to make their own way in the world. These disadvantages make higher achievement more difficult. And its not only about resources. Think about where schools for impoverished populations are built. Many in or near residential / industrial neighborhoods. And what happens there? More dust, pollutants and vermin. African American children are much more likely to develop asthma – they suffer nearly twice the rate of white children likely because of the location of these neighborhoods. If they have a bad night physically, and IF – a big IF – they come to school after such a night – they can be drowsy and less likely to pay attention.
The child who has more frequent absences – whether from poor health, unreliable transportation, having to stay home to care for younger siblings, an unstable family, or disciplinary suspension from unwise and unjust zero tolerance policies – what happens to that child?
What might happen, what does happen: growing frustration, growing loss of self-esteem, an escalating sense of I don’t care anymore and forget about it. Then what might happen… if you know longer care about yourself, if you no longer care about what happens, if you no longer care about anything – the thrill is gone. And you just might seek some kind of meaning, some kind of belonging, some kind of thrill, some place else. And that some place else is what has led to the school to prison pipeline. Its the whole chain.
Some of you know I worked with gangs for a long time. These kids, once you got to know them, and once they got to know you – most of them truly were ok. They had so much of what it takes to succeed – its just that those energies were directed in ways that led to a whole lot of trouble.
And I do need to say – do ALL kids fail because of circumstances beyond their control. No. There are those who succeed. And there are teachers who help them succeed. But the thing is – if you have an entire class of 20 or 30 or more kids who have these life circumstances, how can a teacher devote the time needed and special attention to help that child. They simply can’t. And the possibility exists that the curriculum becomes remedial and too much time is taken from instruction to attend to the issues of disruption at hand. The cycle continues you know. Because these children grow up to have their own children. You can’t be what you can’t see. You can’t know what you don’t know.
I wasn’t raised
Poor in America
Judged by America
Killed in America
My mother raised me with rules
Be polite and obey the rules and I’ll be fine – and I was – because I am white
The mothers of black children raise their children with different rules
Because
They experience life very differently, their parents experienced life very differently, and those generations that went before experienced the same. Lynchings are not ancient history and you know this. Racism is not ancient history and you know this. Hatred and white superiority are not ancient history and you know this.
We have shootings every day in this country with a national average of 109 people dying a day from gun fire. In some places the numbers much, much higher. Black on black crime exists, but so does white on white.
There is profound grief in the black community as they watch the Black bodies pile up in the streets. Fatal encounters of all kinds with little response to make anything better have led to anger, long pent up anger generations old. It is not as if people have not tried to “work within the system” to make change. It hasn’t, it doesn’t, work. You can look back to the earliest architecture of cities in modern history to see how segregation and racism, played a part in where POC lived, how their schools were funded. What discipline in schools was like. Did you hear of zero tolerance policies such as we have today when you were in school? There was discipline yes. You knew you might get sent to the principal’s office or sit out in the hall or miss recess. VERY DIFFERENT than being removed from school for speaking your mind, or worse. Removal far easier for the adult in the room, but what about the student. How much school can you miss before you just don’t care anymore. How much school can you miss until you are so far behind you will never catch up? How much school will you miss until you never return, but yet each year you get a little older, with less options or opportunities for the life that you see on television? So who looks good to you at that point? Who has the power? Who’s going to help you? Who do you need to be an ally with and who do you need to be afraid of? Who? There’s the drug and gun dealer in the neighborhood, the gang king or the trafficker. Or there’s the police. Where do you find community and where do you find fear? How is it that you …. survive?
Author Tony Morrison wrote – Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with one dead Negro’s grief. While the book Beloved is fiction, sadly those words ring true. She wrote from the heart, from the soul, she wrote from her experience. She wrote from a place she lived – that you and I – no matter how many books we read or movies we watch or news we hear, can ever know.
“Is it right that an ever-growing list of names become global icons of the civil rights movement in this country? That their names cry out from the grave for racial justice? Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Daunte Wright and so many others who died without the attention of the entire nation. Name after name. They did not have the luxury of dying a natural death. “
And the rest of us feel – helpless.
“Are there good teachers who know and care – yes. Are there good officers who know and care – yes. Yet – the cycle of inequity continues. Racism continues. Death continues. And society decays. You can only take so many hundreds of years of oppression before other means erupt. The body carries the memories – our own, and of our community. If we are part of humanity, their death becomes the community death. Another’s drop of blood is our drop of blood. Sometimes if you can’t get a response through the channels of the “system”, you channel your energies in other ways. That is what we have witnessed in the past, and what, with much more frequency, we are witnessing now. As Dr. Dyson writes in Long Time Coming, The shame of contemporary riots, uprising, and rebellions does not belong to those in the streets; the shame is that it took even a little destruction of property for them to be heard.”
What I personally hear behind that statement is – apparently the ongoing march of death of black young people isn’t enough to get our attention.
There are rays of hope but they’re coming awfully late. So we need to act, and do so now. Allies need to rise up, and continue fighting. We cannot assume as white people we know what Black people are feeling, or how to direct their efforts of response. We just can’t. We do, not, know a better way as white people. The closest we can get is to be in relationship. We cannot assume that just because we’ve read multiple books, attended conference events, and watched multiple films and paid attention, that we know all. We as white people cannot be the first voice. We can be an ally. We can learn all we can. We can reach out and offer help AS ASKED. We need to learn to listen first and to be in relationship. Always.
We need to involve ourselves if we truly care and want to see change. Working as an ally, “we need to explore how schools can offer balance between education and discipline. We need to explore how to mend the gap between law enforcement and people of color so that police again become servants of the community’s best interests while protecting the community from neighborhood’s worst impulses. President Clinton’s phrase about affirmative action was “mend, don’t end, policing”. That is what defunding the police is meant to communicate. We need to watch legislation at the municipal, state and federal levels – who’s proposing what and why? What is their end game? As members of the white community we need to wrestle with how we have harmed the Black community. That is not an easy proposition. We need to end the planned residential segregation of our neighborhoods, our cities. We need jobs that pay livable wages. We need community policing where we change fear into friend. We need to ensure there are adequate transportation systems.”
Friends segregation & the ensuing racism has not been by accident. If you want to know more read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.
Looking at our own sin of racism never is easy. It is not enough to say we live in a country based in freedom, until we all live in a country based in freedom. That is not the case today. If we really think about it, this should hurt our very soul. We cannot afford to continue to deny our complicity, however small, however large, in the social evil of racism. Traci Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana Ross, and an actress on the series Blackish, wrote: “Our freedom keeps being dismantled and limited because of white comfort.” Yes… all of this makes is making us uncomfortable now. In our hearts many of us don’t want what is happening now to be our way of life. But why? Is it because we don’t want to have riots in our streets? Is it because we fear for our safety? Is it because we don’t want change in our lives that might make us feel – less? Is it because we truly want change and will work for as long as it takes doing whatever it takes as an allied voice to see this world become more like God created it to be?
Someone is not a thug simply because he wears a hoodie. Someone is not a thug because she came to school hungry and acted out. Someone is not a thug because they’re angry. Someone does not deserve to be pushed out because they don’t meet our expectations of what a child, a youth, a young adult “should be”. “A young person in school should NEVER come to the realization” and its accompanying loss of hope – “that they are simply a corpse in the making.”
She stood in front of the reporters, only hours after her son was killed. Protocol broken, a gun used when it was supposed to be the taser. I watched as her husband rubbed her back as she started to cry. A mother, searching for the answers as to why, when no words will ever answer that question that has been asked by far too many mothers for far too many generations. But it happened. He is gone. Tomorrow will never arrive with her son because there are no tomorrows left – not with him. Tomorrows will be lived only through memory. His voice will fade, his smell will slowly disappear from her memory. We understand. All of us have lived loss.
But have any of us lived THIS LOSS?
Resources:
Pushout M. Morris
Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out M. Warren
Long Time Coming M. Dyson
The Color of Law R. Rothstein
Author’s Note: These four texts are well worth your purchase & are summarized in the document above along with my own commentary.
This post is from a speech presented to Velda Rose UMW on April 21, 2021.
Merry Whether Poppycockornot 