A knock came at my door. As I opened it, I saw two policemen. “Ma’am?” one said, “One of your neighbors called to say three Hispanic boys were trying to break into your home. “ “Oh, really?” I said. “Those would be my children,” I calmly told the officers.
My sons are African-American, but I see how someone could have made that “blink test” assumption. The boys had been hanging out with a friend on our lawn but soon left to get a bite to eat. That’s when the person in our predominately White neighborhood called the police. Strangely, I wasn’t angry. I was, in fact, delighted. I finally had corroborating evidence I could share with my sons as soon as they got home. I couldn’t wait. Sadly, they needed to understand how the world saw them---not who they were but what they were.
Being a Black mother in America means being willing to sacrifice your children’s innocence in order to save them. “Never run down the street.” I had told my sons as they approached their teenage years. “You are young black men in America.”
But my sons could not fully grasp my warning. Our family had played by the rules. Grandfathers and Grandmothers had “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.” Ancestors, who survived the Middle Passage and enslavement, gave birth to children who became blacksmiths and farmers, bricklayers, cooks, preachers, teachers, Pullman porters, and doctors. One grandfather graduated from Yale in 1924, with a PhD in Theology.
Despite the Herculean efforts of my family, I knew my sons were not safe. My older brother, an off duty policeman in Chicago, had been killed by white officers while trying to stop a robbery. They called it “friendly fire.” It was anything but. Bill was 26 years old and they shot him six times. No, my sons’ protection would not last as they grew into manhood. Not in America. Not yet.
Unfortunately and predictably, the boys went on to have other firsthand experiences, too many to name. In fact, I don’t know any Black or Brown man in America who hasn’t had a similar experience. Doesn’t that say it all? A study published in the National Institute of Health documents how coping with the stress of “living while black” produces chronic health problems such as hypertension, cardiac disease, diabetes, stroke and increased mortality. No parent should have to prepare a child for this kind of reality. Not in 2020. Enough!
The irony is that human beings are related as well as inter-related. Scientists say we share 99.9% of our DNA. And the 0.1% that is distinctive cannot be neatly categorized by “race.” Vivian Chu, writing for Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “Science in the News” blog, concludes two people of European descent maybe more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other. So yeah… those two policemen at my door? And the neighbor who made the call? They are probably my long, long lost cousins. And I am theirs.
As a mother, the one thing I know is that my passion to protect my children is fierce. I believe most parents feel the same way. It is, after all, Mother Nature’s way of making sure the species survives. Mothers of one animal species have been known to nurture the offspring of another. Can’t we at least do as much?
The intensity of this time presents us with the opportunity for meaningful and lasting growth. Too often in the past we’ve take one step forward and three back, succumbing to ignorance and complacency, ushering in re-entrenchment of the status quo. “Our lives begin to end,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “the day we are silent about things that matter.”
We must cross a bridge that allows us to respect our individuality and our deep kinship as human beings equally.
Simply but profoundly, the way forward is to learn to love other people’s children as though they were our own.
Think about it. Can we really stand by and see the faces of our children in cages? Can we bear witness to hunger in our children and not move heaven and earth to feed them?
We are an extended family. If we are to make the world safe for our children, we must make it safe for all children. Can we do this? We will. We must.