Wednesday, July 6, was a down day for me. I have those in the summer when I’m not connected to social media and the news of the world. In fact, I have spent much of the summer healing from a damaging school year that helped me see people better than I wanted to when it came to issues of race. I was running errands that day and I meant to stop at multiple places when my phone started blowing up from notifications.
“Please don’t let this be some type of violence,” I thought. Every summer feels the same when it comes to news stories of unarmed black men or men of color being killed at the hands of overzealous police. Lives lost while selling loose cigarettes or playing with toy guns at the park or being pulled over for a broken taillight seem to permeate our news. It’s just too much.
What I learned, on my down day, was that a black man in Minnesota, Philando Castile, was stopped by police and shot while his girlfriend recorded it on Facebook Live. Her 4-year-old daughter was in the back seat. I haven’t seen the recording, but I did listen to it. Images are too difficult for my brain to remove and remember: I was healing from the fatigue of fighting against racism in my job. Every day, scores of black students come into public school buildings to learn and every day educators are failing them. Mind you, it’s not all of them, but those who continue to claim how they are “colorblind” and treat everyone equally. According to the American Association of Teacher Education, more than 80 percent of American public school teachers are white and are teaching an increasingly nonwhite population.
And yet, every day as a parent I am reminded that my mostly white and light-skinned children are immune to the type of violence that my own black father or nephews or cousins are targets of in random situations. This is the burden that black families carry – one that also asks us to explain our fears to many unbelieving white friends who’ve never conceived that this type of profiling even exists.
To raise a black child in violent climates or to lose a father or brother or sister means that we live in separate Americas than our white counterparts. We have The Talk with them about when they get stopped, not if. I think of that little black girl in the back seat of a car where her loved one was shot and how her instinct was to comfort her mother. What kind of trauma will she encounter from that? How will her mom be able to function normally after such a horrible encounter with a police officer for what should have been a benign traffic stop? How can we go on like this?
The answer, of course, is that we can’t. We have a lot of work to do, including anti-racism education and oversight of our own communities where there is still too often harassment of people of color by law enforcement, often to collect revenue. The thing that highlighted that for me was the report from the Department of Justice released after the investigation into the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
In it, we learned that police and the courts were more interested in maintaining budgets than they were in ensuring that the public was safe. They were using the residents, of which some 67 percent were black, to account for 93 percent of the arrests that were made. If this is business as usual, we will continue to have unarmed black people as our next hashtag.
Sure, we tell our children to comply and to pull up their pants and a myriad of other issues that amount to respectability politics, but we forget that even Dr. King was killed in nice clothes. The answers lie in our willingness to confront issues that disproportionately affect black people and people of color in our country, but we have to get to work. That means believing black people when we tell you our lived experiences, working on anti-racism and enacting changes to policies, and confronting the trauma of watching not only the deaths of black men and women but also the acquittals in the court system that never seem to bring about charges.
We can’t have another Wednesday like we’ve had.
Kelly Wickham Hurst of Springfield is a 23-year veteran of the public school system as a teacher, guidance dean and assistant principal. She is a writer and blogger who edits the blog “Mocha Momma” and is the married mother of six.
This article appears in Capital City Parent August 2016.
