white mom thoughts

I want to preface this by saying that if you haven't already read at least a fat portion of the blogs, op-eds, and essays black writers have produced since the shootings in Ferguson and in Ohio and since the grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, please go do that now. Because there is no way I'm the voice anyone needs to be hearing about this shitshow; I just happen to need to process it for myself so I can get some sleep.

I am a mom, though. And while I don't like the kind of "women are magic" essentialism inherent in the idea that moms have some sort of special knowledge other human beings lack, I do know that now I am vulnerable in a way I wasn't for the first three decades of my life. I can imagine a world in which I sustain the loss of my parents, my brother, my best friend, my husband. But the day my child is gone, I'm essentially just biding my time until I can extract myself from this world without causing similar ruin for my own parents. 

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Pretty much, Auden. 

Is that why it's so easy to talk about whether or not Mike Brown was charging or stumbling towards Darren Wilson, how likely he was to have taken away his gun, and so apparently hard to acknowledge that a woman's life might be over now? Her child is dead. Exactly which choice are you claiming was so egregious that his death is made any less insane, any less obscene? Why did we work so hard to call for help for Adam Lanzas and Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises and shrug at Leslie McSpadden? 

Again, this is a painfully obvious question, I think, if you're not white, which is why a lot of us seem to be talking about two entirely different stories with two entirely different sets of characters. I'm asking this now because my son is not in the same kind of danger as his classmates and neighbors, so I could take my time figuring it out. There's one definition of privilege. 

It seems now that the forensic and ballistic evidence don't support the initial image of a kid with his hands up, begging Wilson not to shoot. But it's a pretty vast fucking leap from that discovery to the conclusion that what "we" need to do is for black parents and their black kids to act differently so they don't get gunned down in the street. 

And I feel like the people I hear talking now, the people white people are kind of lining up to listen to now, are the ones who want to talk about that, rather than about what seems to be the more immediately relevant issue of how we need cops to stop shooting black kids. 

Wilson may have acted out of fear for his life; he may have been doing what he was trained to do. He doesn't have to be a demon, himself, for this loss to be unbearable and unacceptable. 

But it is. It is unbearable and it is unacceptable. 

Mike Brown may have been reckless or aggressive in the minutes leading up to his death; I don't know. It is unacceptable that he died. 

Darren Wilson might have believed -- because of this behavior, or because of his attitudes about young black men, or both -- that he needed to shoot him to protect his own life. 

And it is still unacceptable that Mike Brown died. 

It may have been the case that Mike Brown was attempting to take Wilson's gun, and Wilson's actions were necessary to protect his life -- and it is still unacceptable that Mike Brown died. 

Whoever is training and supporting and regulating police officers in the  United States has to do so in a way in which cops are not shooting teenagers, whether out of personal racism or lack of resources or both. Because even if we assume that Wilson exercised the only option available to him -- a proposition I'm hardly convinced of, but which I'm also not in a position to refute, since I wasn't there and since so much of the testimony is contradictory  -- he should have had other options. 

If Mike Brown's life mattered enough to the people staffing, training, and regulating the police force, Wilson would have had other options. As scared as I am for my own child, I can't think of one red headed white boy who has been gunned down by a cop, under any circumstances. Not even the ones who kill other children. The school shooters whose deaths generated conversations not about their parents' behavior but about mental health resources died at their own hands. 

If we -- our society, which claims to value everyone equally but which seems unable to come up with anything less outrageous than parenting advice for the parents of the black children we shoot -- if we want to be better, I believe we can. We can make it unacceptable for police to kill black teenagers, even ones playing with toy guns or "charging at" cops. I know this because currently it is unacceptable to kill white teenagers. 

But I don't see how it will happen as long as we keep focusing on -- in the case of kids like Tamir Rice, shamefully digging up -- perceived differences between our white kids, who we want so badly to believe are safe, and other people's black kids, whose vulnerability we want so badly to distance ourselves from. 

To the degree my son is safe from this particular danger, he is safe because he is white. Not because he, or I, or his dad, have done anything different or better than other children and and their families. 

Either this is acceptable to me or it isn't. 

If it's not --  and evidently, it has been acceptable to me up to this point, because here we are -- it needs to change. 

But there's no way to change it while imagining the issue is something other than what it is -- something to do with Mike Brown's behavior, or kids playing with guns, or black on black violence. The issue is the relative value afforded to kids like Mike Brown and Tamir Rice versus kids like mine. And while I have no idea how to recalibrate, it's apparent to me that we have to do this. The alternative is to hold my son's skin color like a talisman, banking on its magic ability to keep him safe while his brown-skinned friends die and we keep talking about how they should have known better.