Dear Other White People: Well, it’s happened again. Another young black man has been murdered for walking down the street in casual clothes. Because I’m gay, I have a perspective on this that you may not have. Not because being gay makes me more likely to be targeted by the police or shot by some random crazy person with a gun. That’s not it. I’m white, after all. I’m way less likely than a black guy to be pulled over, to say nothing of searched, arrested, given a harsh prison sentence, and on and on. No, the perspective I have that you may not stems from the fact that if I ever have a child, it will be via adoption, and that child will therefore not be genetically related to me. In other words, if I have a son, my son might end up being a young black man. If he is, I will worry about his relationship to the police. A lot. In the back of my head will be the fear that he’ll be walking down the street, doing regular kid-type things, and some overzealous cop or random gun-carrying vigilante will decide that he looks like a criminal because his pants are baggy or he has a bandana wrapped around his head. So try this thought experiment: before you talk about any details of Mike Brown’s biography as if they’re relevant to whether he deserved to get shot in the street, before you mention the word “looting,” before you criticize the ways a few outraged people behaved when cops in military assault vehicles were waving rifles at them, take a moment to imagine that that casually dressed young man walking down the street was your son.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 21:26:23 +0000
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