Every Black parent sits their child down at some point in their adolescence for “The Talk,” about how to behave when you are pulled …
Every Black parent sits their child down at some point in their adolescence for “The Talk,” about how to behave when you are pulled over by the police. Even if they pull you over for no good reason, or stop you on a corner for a random body search, you must be polite and deferential. No back talk, no attitude, and no reaching in your pocket to get something without giving them plenty of warning so that you don’t end up lying dead on the street. As the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin erupt in violence after the shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man whom police shot at least seven times in the back, “The Talk” seems like wasted words. Here was a man trying to break up a fight, who was shot near to death by police in front of his children. He becomes another name on the shameful list of Black people killed by the police in the last year, alongside Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Breonna Taylor was shot to death while sleeping in her bed in Louisville, Kentucky when police entered her home on a no-knock warrant, and George Floyd was slain on the street in Minneapolis as he begged a policeman to take his knee off his neck. His words did not matter, nor did his pleading for his mom. As basketball star LeBron James said Sunday night, “We are scared as Black people in America. Black men, Black women, Black kids, we are terrified.” Will anyone hear his words? I am not a mother of biological children, but I have many young people I consider my sons and daughters, as well as having many biological nieces and nephews. On the first night of the Republican convention, I was so scared for those children I nearly burst into tears on broadcast television. And I wasn’t afraid of the socialism, or “socialist utopia,” that speaker after speaker said that Democrats want to impose. The first night of the convention was about race, but it was not a dialogue that encouraged us to find common ground.
