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Magical Cloaks and Targets?

In the wake of more shootings, this white educator and father contemplates how he can undermine a system that makes his sons and him safer than their African-American counterparts. 

 

I have spent a lot of time looking at my two little boys over the last few days. My two little white boys. Blonde hair and fair skin working together like magical cloaks protecting them from one of the greatest evils our country faces.

That thought troubles me, but my unease does not make it any less of a reality. My sons have protections the black children of this country simply don’t have. All little kids are innocent, but my boys are statistically more likely to survive to adulthood. I don’t worry that, when my sons are teenagers, a neighborhood watchman will chase them down because they are wearing hoodies. I have never worried about my two boys getting shot. I don’t ever worry that driving with a taillight out is going to end in me getting shot.

Those realities are totally different for black men, boys, women and girls—and that is a problem that belongs to all of us. No one is free when others are oppressed. I want so desperately to frame recent events in a way that makes them less horrible than they really are. I want to say these shootings are anomalies. But there is way too long a list of dead black individuals to believe that fallacy for long.

So I am left to wonder what I can do as a father, a citizen, a white man and an educator. I was initially relieved, as news of these shootings unfolded, that it is summer and school is not in session. Why? Because I had no idea what I would say to my students. What lesson am I supposed to glean from the shooting of a man pulled over for a taillight while a 4-year-old little girl sits in the backseat? What lesson am I supposed to pull from a video in which a man, already on the ground with two officers on top of him, is shot? What lesson comes from the deaths of the police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge? 

The lessons my students are likely drawing are pretty clear: We live in an unjust society. If you are black, you might get shot by a cop. Black and white people are on opposite sides of some terrible line, staring distrustfully at each other. Those are not lessons I want to teach or affirm, so how can I counter them? 

TT’s Cecile Jones was right in saying in a recent blog, “These are tough conversations to have with our kids and students, but this conversation must happen. We cannot continue to sweep these issues under the rug. … Don’t stay silent even if it feels like the same thing again and again—until every citizen is truly protected and served.” I don’t know what to do other than to continually use my voice to speak about what is really happening. We need to have these conversations, especially with anyone who does not want to look at the realities before us.

We should engage students, as well as neighbors, friends and family, with compelling questions they care about:

●      What is the proper role of police in a community?

●      What happens when police are dressed and equipped like military forces?

●      What political narratives encourage stereotyping and prejudice? 

●      How do we examine our own biases and root them out?

We must also equip ourselves with facts. For example, we know that more white people have been shot and killed by officers than black people have since January 2015, according to a Washington Post database. But that’s not a complete picture. When you consider the percentage of specific demographics in the U.S. population against the percentage of those killed by police officers, systemic bias becomes clear. The Washington Post writes, “White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. … [T]hat means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.”

The magical cloaks my boys were born with may not be wholly impenetrable, but the relative safety they provide is undeniable, especially when compared to young black men and boys of this country who appear to wear targets instead. Unless we talk about—and act on—the reality that this problem is one disproportionately affecting black lives rather than all lives, we are fooling ourselves.

Being white affords my family and me a position of relative safety. That means we must be that much more vocal. Remaining silent makes us complicit in another chapter of American history that does not offer justice for all. While we must recognize how incidents of police brutality disproportionately harm black people, we must act in a way that recognizes these shootings affect all people. We must speak and act not as if this is their problem, but with the knowledge that it is our problem. We must keep pushing the narrative away from divisiveness and toward unity in order to confront an evil that touches us all.   

We must raise our voices in protest until everyone has the same chance at life and liberty.

Editor’s note: Teaching Tolerance has a list of teaching materials to assist with the difficult conversations described in this blog post.

 

Knoll is a writer and English teacher at a public school in New Jersey.

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