A Month in Memoriam: Day 24
“They’re not just children — they’re black children.”
Of all the scripted lines, notions about the rhetoric of hope and dialogue on the most recent episode of Blackish, this stuck with me.
If you’ve seen the show, you know that Jack and Diane are the witty twins who are pretty astute. While watching the news, they asked what was going on. A black boy was tazed 37 times. Rainbow tried to shelter them from the reality.
(I’m curious to know what age they’re supposed to be in the show because in real life, the actor that plays Jack is 11 but I digress…)
Black children.
Stolen innocence. Assumed criminals. Burdened by default.
Did you know that on average, black boys are seen as 4.9 years older than they actually are by whites?
So apparently, Tamir looked about 17 rather than 12. Mike 22 rather than 17.
I wonder — what does it feel like to be a Black child today?
I’m a 90’s baby so the times in which I grew up are not the same as they are now.
I was eight when Amadou was murdered in February 1999. My parents did not let my brother and I watch TV during the week so perhaps that’s why I did not remember his death when it happened. It was the same year that my mother home-schooled my brother and I as we prepared to move from Santa Fe to Raleigh.
I do remember being the only Black student in the Gifted & Talented class at my new elementary school.
I remember my mother having to fight to get me in the class in the first place.
I remember writing my heart out for a short-story contest only not be chosen as the winner.
My mother told me it wasn’t because I wasn’t talented but because I was Black.
She knew things I did not yet know. She saw things I could not yet see.
But that day, my nine-year-old self saw what racism looked like for the first time.
