I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. (He's one of the two men in the picture above. I'm the other one. Neither of us gave permission for our faces to be shown.) As we were talking, he said that most Black men don't have very close relationships with their sons.
"Why not?" I asked. I can't imagine not being close to my sons (or my daughter), and I tend to dismiss or at least seriously question cultural generalizations / stereotypes when they manifest themselves...even in the words of people I love.
His answer was terrifying.
"I think it goes back to slavery," he said. "You knew that your children could be taken away from you and sold, and you'd never see them again, so you didn't allow yourself to get attached to them. And that was especially true of sons."
It's just another reminder of the hateful legacy of these United States of America. And when I turn on the television today and see stories about a Black man being choked to death by a White cop in Minnesota...and a Black woman being shot to death by three White cops in her own apartment in Kentucky...and a Black man being threatened with police action by a White woman in New York...and a Black man being shot by a White man in the streets in Georgia...well, what are we telling Black men?
It seems pretty clear to me. We're telling them that their lives are worth nothing, that they have no power, and that if they don't like it, that's just tough shit, isn't it.
You know what happens to me when people treat me like shit? I get mad. Sometimes I strike out. Under the right conditions, I'm absolutely sure that I could set some things on fire. Not because it's right...but because They're wrong. As wrong as wrong can be.
One of my Facebook friends's friends had a link to a post by a Kentucky business owner who was expressing his delight in the fact that a cop had murdered a Black man in the streets. He actually said that it meant there was "one less piece of shit on the streets." The friend's friend was suggesting that people should boycott that business owner. I'm thinking that we should be doing more than that...but I don't know what.
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