Image via Lands End.
After reading news of the pool party in Texas, I sit on my bed and talk to my daughter. She lies across the foot of the bed, listening.
“I think you already know, honey, that if the police encounter you and your friends, they’ll treat you differently because of your skin color.”
“Yes,” she says, and my heart begins to break again.
Part of my job as a mother is to teach her not to take for granted the privileges I have as a white, educated, middle-aged woman who looks harmless. As a teenager, as a person of color, the world sees her differently. I have taught her to speak her mind, and now I am afraid I haven’t taught her enough about keeping quiet.
There are lessons we all learn as women.
When she started to go out with friends, I had to teach her how to respond to street harassment. When she began to study at a coffee shop, we talked about how to deal with unwanted attention, with people who stand too close or who won’t leave you alone.
There are lessons about being a person of color.
Now we talk again about how to navigate an encounter with the police. This is a conversation African-American parents have been having for years, but I am new to it. Privilege has shielded me in a way that will never happen for my daughter.
In my mind is the picture of a white man, a police officer, sitting on a teenage girl in a bathing suit. As a mother, as a woman, the image makes me want to throw up. The disrespect for her body and her teenage sense of self leaves me both enraged and in tears.
“If they tell you to stop, or to sit, follow instructions,” my husband tells her. “Do exactly what they tell you to do. And don’t be mouthy.”
“When people start yelling, no one can think clearly. Nothing good happens when the yelling begins,” I add, trying to help her survive any moment of chaos between police officers and teenagers.
“But,” I hear myself say, “in the beginning, if you think you can get away, run and don’t look back.” The advice surprises me. Recent events have taught me what African-American parents have known for a long time – skin color will trump everything else. I no longer have confidence that a police officer will see my daughter as an honor student, an employee of the library, a girl with a generous heart. My job is to nurture that in her, and other young people, even in a world that can’t always see it. My job is also to keep her alive, in a world that’s hard on young people of color, and I fear that I don’t know enough to teach her. I fear for the spirits of people who have to learn to be quiet, sit down, obey orders. I fear for us all, when this is acceptable to us.