Some thing has to happen...

I Refuse to Have ‘The Talk’ With My Black Son

By  Issac J. Bailey

Watching the video of a Chicago cop shooting a 17-year-old 16 times—most after the teen lay on the ground—angered me so much it almost convinced me to go back on a pledge I made long ago not to follow the footsteps of many black American parents and have “The Talk” with my 14-year-old son. I was tempted to warn him about the dangers that still exist for young blacks in our society, to tell him about how he should be careful and deferential around police, and to be wary of how he is perceived by whites.

But I’m not going to have that talk with him, or my 11-year-old daughter.

I understand the black American experience and have never shied away from teaching my kids about that all-too-painful history. I am, after all, a 43-year-old black man—the descendant of slaves—who grew up with eight black brothers and a black father, then a black stepfather, and was educated in an almost all-black high school. I know that the scars from slavery, discriminatory housing policies and the war on drugs have all contributed to the pain and poverty my family has endured—and why we’ve become so fractured, with some ending up in prison and others at Harvard. I think about injustice often: I’m raising a black son, after all, and a black daughter who has dreadlocks—a hairstyle that too often has led to racial profiling of all sorts—like her mother, my black wife.

I also spent the better part of my youth with Rodney King’s beating fresh in my mind and the beat of Ice Cube’s and N.W.A.’s “Fu-- tha police” ringing in my ears, convinced that I’d become a victim of white supremacy in the form of a badge and baton. I waited for it. And yet, two decades later, here is my reality: Cold steel has never been pushed up against my left check by a police officer or anyone else. Handcuffs have never been wrapped around my wrists. I’ve never been racially profiled in any significant way. (A security guard once briefly followed me around a grocery store.) In fact, when cops have stopped me for driving too fast, I have been in the wrong. And the cops have been generous.

I don’t have tales to relay about how I’ve been stopped and frisked while my friends and I walked down the sidewalk or in the wrong neighborhood. I can’t post selfies of such stops on Instagram like the comedian Chris Rock. I wasn’t pulled over heading to a photo shoot for my book, as intellectual Cornel West experienced. Truth be told, the times I visited New York and Chicago and lived in Boston and Cambridge for a year, I’ve never even had a cab refuse me service—even as my wife and I wandered along a strange street in the Windy City at 2 a.m.

In fact, responding to the challenges of being an adult with a severe stutter has been more problematic—by miles—than those that have come with being a black man who grew up in the South. I haven’t been denied jobs and other opportunities because of my race, but have been because too many people don’t understand why I talk the way I do.

I’ve been told not to share this version of my story because it will supposedly make it harder for black men who have felt the sting of profiling to be believed. I sympathize with that criticism: I’ve seen white people use my story as a sort of escape hatch to deny basic uncomfortable realities they’d rather not face. One black man saying he doesn’t fear the police, to their ears, is more powerful than a thousand black men sharing heart-wrenching stories about why they do.

But denying the diversity within the black experience often reinforces the harmful stereotypes we all are trying to eliminate. Not all black people are alike even as we, collectively, have to grapple with the issue of race in ways others often don’t. And it’s OK to say that.

It is because of my history—the pain I have suffered and also the pain that I have not—that I won’t be making any special effort to tell my son, or daughter, to be wary of white cops, or any cops. I don’t want them living their lives with preconceived notions about how dangerous the world will be for them. I don’t want them carrying unnecessary, misguided burdens the way I did. Trying to get them to become mature young people in a world that doesn’t quite seem to understand what it wants to be—or them to be—is burden enough.

I also don’t want them stereotyping white cops the way too many young black boys are stereotyped. I don’t want false, negative images about cops unintentionally affecting their behavior during stressful encounters with police officers, perhaps leading to fearful, reflexive actions on their part that could turn a routine traffic stop deadly.

What’s more, I don’t want to inadvertently teach them that the person in authority is always right and should always be obeyed. “The Talk” has been conceived to keep our kids safe in a world too often hostile to the presence of their dark skin. But what it also does, in a way, is convince them to submit to unfairness if it comes in the form of authority. We must teach them to respect police officers, not because they are police officers, but because they are fellow human beings. I expect my kids to not be bullies, to not mouth off at adults, no matter the circumstance.

But just as important, we must also teach them to respect themselves. I want my son, and daughter, to know that they can civilly question an unlawful order by a police officer. I want them to understand that they don’t have to consent to baseless searches, that they should not answer questions without a lawyer or their parents present, given what we know about the abuses in the system. They need to know that just because someone wears a badge doesn’t give that person the right to treat them as though they are inferior more than they need to know to keep their hands on the steering wheel as a cop approaches the car.

I get that “The Talk” is designed to keep our kids safe in a particular moment, so they can survive. But let’s be real. That doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Levar Edward Jones. He was shot multiple times by a South Carolina trooper during a stop in October while eagerly complying with the officer’s demands. And there’s little reason to believe it would have worked for Laquan McDonald in Chicago. He was acting erratically but was not a threat to the officers on the scene. Still, he was pumped full of bullets and the criminal justice apparatus went out of its way to protect his alleged murderer, which happens too frequently throughout the country when a cop goes bad.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: If a cop wants to harm our children, our children will be harmed—which is why our unrelenting focus should be on reforming the system and not burdening our kids with responsibilities not even the most mature adult could hope to uphold. When an officer intentionally harms my kid—or yours—he should be punished, and punished harshly. We should expect him to be the professional, the one who calms down a mouthy teen or a frustrated, angry woman, without resorting first to ugly force.

When an officer makes a deadly mistake, we must demand that he not hide behind misguided union-inspired procedures or the Blue Wall of Silence, that he acknowledge what happened to help us design better policies to reduce the odds such mistakes will keep happening. And when police departments find the courage to walk such a path, we must find the courage to accept their apology instead of being committed to a knee-jerk demonization of those who wear that uniform.

But one thing must be made clear: Those with the most power have the most responsibility to correct wrongs. We have given police officers a gun and taser and pepper spray and baton and hand-to-hand combat training and guidelines about when to shoot and the authority to lock us up—and even take our lives. We must make sure they deserve the right to keep wielding so much power. We should be unrelenting in that demand.

“The Talk,” though, complicates that message, for it has simply become another form of respectability politics. It simply perpetuates the myth that if only black people would be perfect all would go well, racism would cease to exist and rappers would never again have to make protest songs.

I don’t want my children believing that myth any more than I want them believing that cops—because of the color of their skin and the presence of a badge—are out to do them harm.