#BlackLivesMatter on the First Day of Kindergarten

One day he comes into the kitchen and tells you that the other kids wouldn't let him play their game and told him it was because he is the wrong color.  He is five years old.  And you think, Here we go.  Even before kindergarten, it begins.

All mothers are nervous before the start of Kindergarten.  I know this.  We are all concerned about mean teachers and mean children.  We fret that they won't eat their lunch or will have trouble making friends or will struggle with homework.  We are anxious that school will kill their curiosity and enthusiasm about learning.

But mothers of Black sons, and other sons of color, have extra worries you may never have considered.  Will he be excluded from games because of his race?  Will my child get blamed for something another child did because he is Black?  Will normal childhood behavior get him labeled as the bad kid when the same behavior in a white child would be tolerated?  Will he be expected to speak for his whole race whenever something about Black people comes up?  Will he have to sit through tone-deaf lesson plans and listen to teachers spout racist nonsense unaware of their own biases?  And these are just the threats to their hearts and souls.  There are also the threats to their bodies, from strangers who will make racist assumptions about them, perceive them as threats even before puberty.

The beginning of school is the start of their lives in an outside world where we cannot any longer protect them from those who will see them as stereotypes instead of as people.  Even before they can read or reliably tie their own shoes, Black children are more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students.  We know that Black boys are estimated to be much older than they actually are. That problem may have contributed to the murder by a police officer of a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland.  The world is simply more hostile for our sons, even the world of school, where they ought to be safe.

These are the realities that Black mothers have lived with forever.  The fact that white mothers of Black sons are starting to talk openly about such things shouldn't make people take it more seriously.  Sadly, perhaps it will, so here I am talking about it.

I am grateful that my son is extremely well-behaved in public and focused in preschool.  He is polite and friendly and endearing and happy and, for a few more years at least, very cute.  But I know that isn't enough to protect him.  Respectability is not enough to protect any of our sons, but we cling to it anyway, because it's better than nothing, because we know they'll have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get the respect they deserve. I am grateful to live in a part of the country that is no longer majority white, and in which overt racism is socially stigmatized.  I'm grateful that we chose a neighborhood in which the school is fairly diverse.  I'm grateful for our church community full of adults and older children of color who provide role models and advice when things happen.

I am also afraid.  I fear that I won't be there to defend him the first time someone calls him the N-word.  (I know we are lucky it hasn't happened yet.)  I fear that when he gets into an argument with a white student, it will automatically be the tall Black kid's fault.  I fear that my white privilege cannot protect him when he isn't holding my hand.  I fear that by the end of 5th grade he will be a scary Black man in the eyes of strangers.

But I am not paralyzed by my fear.  We prepare him as best we can.  We talk about racism.  We talk about what to do if someone calls him out of his name.  We talk about in the fact that he doesn't have to answer people's questions about his family if he doesn't want to, that he can decide how to tell his own story.  We talk about not wearing your hood up and how you talk to police, how you behave if you get pulled over.  We don't obsess over the dangers.  We don't teach him to be terrified of the whole world.  But we do speak honestly and openly about race and racism. He has already been excluded from games because of his color, after all. To deny that reality would damage him as much as the obnoxious children who excluded him, maybe more.

I am also not consumed by my fear.  I still talk with excitement with him about his new adventure.  I still stand grinning in the back-to-school section looking at lunch boxes.  I still get his wardrobe ready and hope for a good teacher and gossip with my mom friends about all the changes in store.  I still love that he loves his new backpack and insists on wearing it around the house.  But the worry is still in the back of my mind, even then.

Now, I know that some of you think I am borrowing trouble.  Some of you think this is a post-racial America, and racism is over, and talking about race makes me the real racist.  Some of you don't talk about race with your kids because you want them to be "colorblind." Refusing to discuss or acknowledge racism only allows it to perpetuate.  Perhaps if more white people would speak up, with their kids and with their friends, we wouldn't have to be so scared to see our sons growing older.

Racism isn't just hoods and burning crosses.  We are all products of a culture that teaches that white is best, and nobody grows up in a culture like that without being affected.  No power structure is immune from that influence, be it police department or church or school district or classroom.  So many people want to deny this reality, perhaps for fear of accepting blame. 

So we allow our world to continue to kill Black kids and then try to find a reason they had it coming.  He should have been more polite.  Why did she mouth off like that?  He shouldn't have run.  It's his parents' fault.  Look how trashy they are.  He should have gone straight home.  Never you mind that a white kid in the same situation would still be breathing.

And so mothers of Black sons are afraid sometimes, and we have to be brave, because that is the world into which we send our beloved sons on the first day of kindergarten: a world in which they are at the very bottom of the list of which lives matter.  

A.M. Manay is a writer and mother.  Her novel, She Dies at the End, is available on Amazon Kindle.  Follow her on twitter (@ammanay) or Facebook (facebook.com/ammanaywrites).

Baltimore Uprising: True and False Conclusions Drawn from this Week

People are drawing a lot of conclusions from recent events in Baltimore.  Let's examine a few, shall we?

True Conclusions

Decriminalize drug possession already

A huge amount of police harassment occurs over checking people for drugs.  The drug war destroys lives and does nothing to actually help people not do drugs.  It makes money for police departments and private prisons and serves no other useful purpose.  It gives police a reason to harass people who live in low income neighborhoods.  And I'm pretty sure being a police officer would be safer and more rewarding if we ended the war on drugs and they could spend their time helping people instead of effing people up over an ounce of weed.

Our justice system is fucked up beyond belief

Literally.  White people and people with money don't believe how fucked up it is.  Police and prosecutors are incentivised to make as many arrests and get as many convictions as possible no matter how penny ante they are, no matter whether or not it makes people safer.  Private prisons make a mint off of small time drug offenders.  Black people are more likely to be charged with resisting arrest for the same behavior as white people who aren't charged, more likely to be prosecuted for the same crimes than white people. Cities balance their budgets with exorbitant fines extracted from the poor rather than raising taxes on people who can afford it.  Protesters are held for two days without charge, in crowded cells, with no access to food or water or lawyers.  It is a right mess, and police and local governments need some real oversight.

The people of Baltimore care about their city

They care enough to protest, and they care enough to clean up the mess when it gets out of hand.  They care enough to try to find ways to feed and care for their children when the city cancels school for a bunch of kids on free breakfast and lunch.  They care enough to speak truth to power when the cable news tried to peddle bullshit.  They care enough to try to prevent violence between police and protesters.  

The people who run Baltimore are bad decision makers

I know, let's shut down public transit right when kids get out of school and meet a bunch of teenagers with cops in riot gear.  That can only end well.  Oooh, and let's let drunken sports fans mix with protesters.  Sounds fun.  And I sure am glad we didn't buy body cameras for our police a while back.  Jesus Christ.

Half the people (at least) on Facebook are hypocrites

Why don't the looters take personal responsibility for their own neighborhoods?  Well, why don't the cops take personal responsibility for killing someone for the crime of pissing them off?  Why don't they take responsibility for breaking someone's neck and failing to call the paramedics?  

But, looting isn't the right way to protest!  Oh, did you miss the week of peaceful protests before the riots started? Of course you did. Before they started breaking stuff, you didn't even know who Freddie Gray was because the media figured they couldn't make enough money off of telling you about it until there were sirens and fires and ghettos to make fun of.  I'm not pro destruction.  I'm not pro lost jobs and pro grandma not getting her pills because the CVS burned down.  I don't like it, but I sure as hell can understand it.  If you don't understand it, it's because you don't want to.

A person is smart.  A person is moral and kind.  Mobs are destructive.  They have been ever since there were enough people on the planet to make one.  Take a group of people with nothing to lose and do something that fills them with anger, and had things happen.  That isn't due to race.  That's just human nature.  Maybe our society should make sure even the poorest of us have something to lose and something to live for.

But white people don't do this kind of thing.  The Black community needs to condemn the violence.  Oh, like the white community condemns the violence when white kids riot after they lose and/or win a basketball and/or football and/or baseball game?  Or when one of us shoots up a school or movie theater?   Oh, I forgot, only Black people represent the entirety of their race when they break the law.  Our criminals are crazy, and theirs are symptoms of social pathology.  And the French and Russian revolutions don't count.

Some police need to learn better coping skills

We cannot continue to give police a pass on brutality, a pass on killing unarmed people who pose no threat to them.  I realize being a cop is dangerous and difficult, but they need to be held to a higher standard.  There are a lot of jobs more dangerous than being a policeman, and we don't give the people who do them a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Donny killed somebody?  Oh, but he's a crab fisherman, so it's cool. Mark ran a guy over with his garbage truck in a fit of road rage?  Well, shit happens.  That guy should have stayed on the sidewalk.

You know who manages to deal with mouthy, uncooperative young people in large groups all day long without laying a finger on them?  Teachers.  Somehow we manage without a gun or a taser.  Some of those kids even smell like weed and swear at us and have criminal records, but by some miracle, we all get through the day alive.  And we get paid a hell of a lot less than cops.

  

If you can't deal with assholes all day without losing your temper, don't become a cop.  That's the job.  

False Conclusions

Protesters are anti-police and want cops to get hurt

Most proteseors don't want police to get hurt on the job.  Most people know there are good police and appreciate what they do for society.  What people are against is a culture in many police departments of dehumanizing the very people they are supposed to protect and serve.  What people are against is the refusal to address the biases that permeate our society, implicit racism that teaches all of us, cops included, to be terrified of young Black men to the point of killing them even when they don't pose an actual threat.  Being anti police brutality doesn't make you anti police officer.

Black moms need to beat their kids more

Oh, yeah, if those looters had been smacked around some more, there wouldn't have been any riots.  Riiight.  More violence, that's the ticket.  You know what else would prevent riots?  The police not killing people for no reason and then doing their best to evade responsibility for it.  

And all those people in prison? It's totes because their moms only gave them timeouts or took away their toys or their allowance when they acted up.  If only they had beaten their children.  Oh, my bad, almost everyone in prison received corporal punishment as kids.

And let's not even bring up how much slavery and Jim Crow play into corporal punishment in the Black community.

If you don't run and don't fight, you'll be fine.

Running from the cops is not a capital offense.  Neither is resisting arrest.  Neither is mouthing off to the cops.  It's foolish, sure.  You know who tends to make foolish decisions?  Young people and frightened people.  People with mental health issues and people in altered states.  You know who should have better judgment?  Adult, professional police officers trained to deal with stressful situations.

Also, there are plenty of dead people who neither ran nor resisted arrest and were killed by police anyway.  I love how we're apparently supposed to treat the police with the level of caution usually reserved for wild dogs, but it's the protestors who are called animals.

This will never happen to your Black son, because you are raising him right (unlike all those Black parents)

I am raising him right.  He's smiling and friendly and kind.  He yes sirs and no sirs and pleases and thank yous with the best of them.  He never gets in trouble at school.  He already has a college fund.  He already knows not to take his hands off the wheel.  He knows to wear his hood down.  He knows not to run from the police.  He knows not to break the law.  He is 5 years old, and everyone loves him.  Am I reducing the odds something bad will happen to him?  I certainly hope so.  Is it foolproof?  Hell no.

When he gets old enough to go somewhere by himself, my white privilege isn't going to cover him anymore.  And when he's a teenager, he may go through a rebellious stage, like a lot of kids.  He may go through times of looking like an angry black kid instead of a happy one.  White kids get to go through phases like that.  They get to make mistakes of youth.  They get to swear and smoke weed and dress poorly and put stupid pictures on Facebook and act generally like idiots and still be "good kids with a bright future ahead of them."  Black kids should be able to do the same without having to worry about getting shot for it.

And the implication that I am necessarily a better parent because I'm white and married someone with earning power is racist and classist, and I don't want to hear it.