When I was a boy I played with guns

When I was a boy I played with guns. True. This was not not normal.

The children in the townhouse neighborhood where my parents lived built forts with stockades and trenches in the woods behind townhouses.

Warmaking was part of children’s play. Normalization of violence and tools of violence through children. It’s weird to think about it. But it’s stuff for another time, perhaps.

Toy guns, cowboys and Indians, playing war, this was normal in the neighborhood where my parents lived in Virginia. I have to think it was normal for children, males especially, who were children around the time I was a boy. I think I’m right.

Subterranean walkways under the townhouses connected the woods with the parking lot in the middle of the neighborhood. I remember gun battles spilling out from the forts in the woods into those tunnels and into the parking lot.

I remember the guns, toy plastic guns. Does it matter if the gun looks real, or even if it is real, in the hands of a boy? I remember shouting, children should, “Rat-a-tat-tat!” and “Bang! Bang, you’re dead!” This was normal children’s play.

Tim McGinty, the Ohio prosecutor who decided not to prosecute Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback for shooting Tamir Rice and leaving him to die, he was never a boy, apparently. Tim McGinty skipped that part of his life and went straight to enforcing the law.

No man on the Ohio grand jury that declined to indict Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback for shooting twelve year-old Tamir Rice was a boy, ever, it would seem. They were born and sworn, immediately, into grand jury duty. There are no bothersome memories of childhood, children’s games, cowboys and Indians, play war. There is no bothersome empathy.

It’s hard to wrap my head around.

Think about this:

There’s a way black boys need to behave while driving, when they start to exercise independence and begin to venture out into the world on their own away from family and its protection. When they’re pulled over by the police, which does happen, for running a traffic light, for driving a car with a nonworking taillight, for being black, there’s a way black boys need to behave. It’s more than respecting authority when interacting with its agents. It’s understanding your place in the world and being mortally afraid and careful not to do something to be crushed, literally, by its machinery. People with nonwhite sons, like me, have written about it more eloquently. See The Talk.

Independence, allowing a young man to go forth in the world and discover it, independence that allows a person to begin to make something of himself in the world, that’s not something black boys are allowed. That, in part, is what The Talk is about.

From Ohio, it seems, from the mistakes the state’s prosecutor and its grand jury made, in a message broadcast clearly throughout the United States in a way that rings true with people, there is a way black boys need to play, too. Maybe there is a Talk II. Play, that is not allowed to black boys.