Against All Odds
My grandma was crazy.
Like she had all of her faculties, accounted for all of her money, but she gave zero *ahem* “cares.”
But at one point, several years before she passed, her crazy slipped over to something else and gave way to paranoia. Like she stayed calling the police. For everything. Asinine things. Hilarious things. The sheriff even paid a personal visit to her home because she called so much. (He also threatened her with jail if she kept calling but that’s a story for another day.) So, my family being who we are, at some point, it became funny to us. It was a joke that if you spent the night at her house, be prepared to wake up to flashlights in your face with police standing over you.
We, now, jokingly call my daughter my grandma’s name because lately she’s shown the same “affinity” we’ll say, for the police. Like she damn near idolizes them. If she falls, she wants to call the police. If she loses her doll, call the police. If someone is mean to her, call the police. Because the police will help her and take the bad people to jail. And during one of these “call the police” moments, it stopped being funny to me. I stopped laughing because it struck me that one day in the future, I’m going to have to dim the light in her eyes about the police. I’m going to have to tell her that they’re not all heroes. That many of them will be there to genuinely help her but that she needs to be careful around all of them. That for some of them, she won’t be my cute little cocoa bean. She’ll be a Black girl (who already looks older than her age) and is somehow less innocent, less vulnerable, and less deserving of protection. That her natural inquisitiveness and thirst for fairness can be perceived as threatening and defiant. And it sliced my heart to think about just how unfair that was. How other people of other skin tones, don’t have to have that talk with their kids. To not have that conversation with Black girls is naively optimistic. But for Black boys, it could be considered dangerous and irresponsible.
James Baldwin said, “'To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. '”
I say, it’s to be in a relatively persistent state of trauma.
If having a child is making the decision to have your heart walk around outside your body, imagine it walking around with a target on it. For a lot of Black Americans, that’s what it is to parent a Black child in America.
And there’s only so much trauma a person can take.
It’s why as important as that Ahmaud Arbery video is, I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it. It’s as important as Mrs. Till leaving Emmett’s casket open but my heart ain’t ready for it. I’m glad it’s out there. I’m glad it’s lead to arrests. I pray it leads to justice.
But I’m tired. A lot of us are.
It’s why when y’all president started calling covid-19 the “Chinese virus,” a lot of prominent black voices were less vocal on the issue. It wasn’t that they didn’t think it was wrong or that they didn’t empathize with the rising number of Asian-Americans that were becoming victims of hate crimes—because they did and they do. It’s because many Black people are tired of showing up and fighting for others in a way that isn’t always reciprocated. You’ll find Black people, Black women especially, on the front lines of damn near every cause—LGBTQIA rights, kids in cages at the borders, keeping pedophiles out of office in Alabama, the Women’s March, Me Too, etc. Black women will show up and turn up. Online and/or in person. But who shows up for us? This can’t just be “our” issue. It’s an American issue. It’s a human rights issue.
That’s why it was so refreshing and encouraging for me to see the many different voices running and standing for Ahmaud, for justice, for his mother, for his humanity. It was beautiful. And we need more of it.
We’re tired of having the conversation. We need more people who may not look like us to have it for us. Talk to your people, your friends, your family. If no one else, talk to your kids. For my baby’s sake. Because the development of racist attitudes and prejudices is not always overt. It’s in what they grow up seeing as beautiful, as kind, as worthy, as equal.
Because my baby’s strong. God knows she’s strong. She’s going to be a fighter. But just because she can fight doesn’t mean she should have to. I’m tired enough for her.
