Walking While Black

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/walking-while-black

Walking While Black
E.J. Graff
March 20, 2012

In just a few years, some people will look at my son and instead of seeing “child,” will see “menace.”


I’m sick to my stomach about the Trayvon Martin shooting that Jamelle Bouie mentioned here yesterday.

snip//

Here’s how Mychal Denzel Smith puts it at The Nation:

On February 26, during halftime of the NBA All-Star game, the 17-year-old high school junior went to a nearby store in the Orlando suburb where he was visiting his father and stepmother in order to buy some candy for his younger brother. He returned to his family a six-foot, three-inch, 140-pound corpse.

snip//

If the colors here were reversed, if a white man were dead by gunshot, do you think for a minute that the black man would be walking around free?

snip//

I feel sick to my stomach with helplessness, once again, as a white parent of an African American boy. My little man is eight, and most people guess that he’s 10 or 11. He’s a foot taller and much broader and more muscular than most other kids his age. His feet are already longer than mine, and I’ve got big feet. In just a few years, he’s going to look 16 or 18—the age when some people look at his skin color and, instead of seeing “child,” see “menace.”

Someday my young man is going to go for a walk, and I won’t be with him.

I feel sick to my stomach.

[SoCalDem]

1. One of my bowling buddies told me about how upset he & his wife were

when they had to have "the talk" with their sons.

Not the talk about sex or drugs or gangs..

THE TALK was about personal safety when they were outside their "home space".

He said it was humiliating for them to have to tell their boys (then 12 & 14) about how insignificant their lives were to "some people".

That the same people who would cheer them on as they played soccer/football/baseball, might not "recognize" them at night as they walked/drove through town, or might not help them in an emergency situation.

My friend is a CPA and his wife an attorney. They have lived most of their lives (and all of their kids' lives) in a very nice suburban setting, where everyone is friendly, but they also know that at night, people tend to get "scared".

He also had to tell them that as they began to want to drive, there were different rules for them, because they could never know which cop might be the one who would stop them or what kind of treatment they might get.

His sons are now grown, but their teen years were horrifyingly tense for the family, and every time they left the house to go do normal teen-things, he and his wife always waited up because they never knew when something might happen, and his wife said she would never forgive herself if she had been asleep in her bed as her child lay dying somewhere.

[babylonsister]

2. Your account gave me goose bumps, literally.

I cannot even fathom children having to acknowledge the potential hate out there over nothing they ever deserved, but we are seeing it unfold now. I'm sad for all of us that this country hasn't gotten over certain poisoned attitudes and actions.

[SoCalDem]

3. What bothered them the most was that they had MORE fear for their kids

in suburban modern America, than when they were kids in the segregated South. Back then the "rules" were drilled into them from birth, and they grew up knowing "their place". Their kids grew up believing that they could do anything, achieve anything, and travel about without fear....and they could...as unassuming little kids, but once they started to reach adult proportions, it all changed in a blink of an eye.

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. +1000

[tblue37]

7. One of the kids in my daycare was a very sweet, but very large for his age,

African-American boy. I had that "talk" with him. He was in particular danger, both because of his size and because I (a white woman) am like a second mother to him, and his daycare "siblings" were almost all white, so he didn't have the sort of fear of white people that he might need to survive if he ever ran into a jerk like Zimmerman.

He is now a sweet, polite, and gentle (and big) 22-year-old--but I still worry about him, because he trusts white people more than he probably should.

[EmeraldCityGrl]

4. Trayvon's girlfriend was on the phone with him

when the crime took place. She told him to run when he expressed his
fear someone was following him. He told her he would not run but would
walk more quickly. The first thing that came to my mind was he had been
advised by his parents not to run in a situation like that for the very reasons
you expressed. It might give an unstable or malicious person reason to act.

Trayvon Martin did everything right. Now it's time for the authorities to do the
right thing. No American family should have to live under this kind of terror.

[babylonsister]

6. Poor kid, poor family. I have grave doubts about the authorities, but

am grateful the FBI and DOJ are getting involved.