These are the stories I usually share about parenting a child of color. Or I tell about Mitike's own growing awareness of her difference. Or I detail the saga of my learning how to care for her hair. Or I recount the story about the lady who told us that Halle Berry's mother just told her she was beautiful every day, which empowered her to stand up to a hostile world.
But the story of Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, moves this conversation to a different place. When I heard the news on NPR of the August 9 shooting, Mitike was coloring at the kitchen table. I looked at her, and her brown eyes were wide, and I chose to not turn off the radio. At dinner, we talked about it. "I just don't understand why, if he wasn't doing anything wrong," she told me. None of our conversation was about race. I didn't want to make note of it unless she did, and she wanted to focus more on the unfairness of the situation, that an armed police officer would shoot an unarmed teenager who had correctly put his hands in the air. I'm certain Mitike would have discussed the event in the same way if an unarmed white teenager had been shot by a black police officer, instead.
It's not that my 7-year-old is unaware of the complicated ways race intertwines with justice and opportunity in this country. Every January, her class studies Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and finds out how he utilized non-violent resistance to insist segregation was wrong. Last year, in first grade, they added Rosa Parks to this strangely isolated study of race relations in the U.S. The chapter books Mitike finds to read now have overwhelmingly white protagonists; the few with protagonists of color are nearly all about the Civil Rights Movement. Sometimes, she chooses books with white characters just so she can get a lighter-hearted story. Someone needs to write a series of books that feature a strong African-American girl in the modern day, doing normal things, like trying to be a kid in a complicated world.
Mitike knows about slavery, again from children's books. She knows about the Civil War. She knows about segregation and poverty (largely from her love of the Ruby Bridges story). But until this summer, she thought (and I let her think) that all of this racial strife was in this country's past. Surely, the adults had fixed it, right? It was only days after we heard the NPR coverage of Michael Brown's shooting that Mitike asked me at bedtime one night, "Did they shoot Michael Brown for the same reason they shot Dr. King?"
I'm sorry to say I'm not surprised that the Grand Jury in Ferguson failed to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Michael Brown. Evidently, grand juries do not have a reputation for indicting police officers. I'm not surprised, and I'm still angry. The thousands of people protesting across the country tonight are not just protesting the death of Michael Brown; they're asking for a nation-wide examination of why a disproportionate number of people in prison are people of color; of why a disproportionate number of people in poverty are people of color; of why schools comprised predominately of kids of color often have fewer resources and inferior support. An African American woman told an NPR reporter today in Ferguson that she hopes awareness and justice come from the tragedy of Michael Brown's death. This has been a long, ugly road, this construction of "race" in the United States, and the road -- and the ugliness -- continue.
Of course, the conversation is even more complicated by class. Mitike, as the daughter of a middle-class social studies teacher in Boulder, Colorado, is inevitably growing up differently than a 7-year-old girl in Ferguson, Missouri or Sanford, Florida, where Treyvon Martin was shot. She's also a girl, which further shifts the perceptions strangers might have of her. The conversation we should all be having is not just about race, but about the ways in which race, class and gender tangle in the United States, and what we can do about it.
What can we do about it? Well, I could close my eyes. I could tell myself that my daughter is safe here in Boulder, and that this problem is distant from us. But I could only pretend that because I'm white. Because I can walk into a public space and hold all kinds of power because my skin color is perceived to be white. Talk to me long enough and find out I'm lesbian, find out I've got an African child, and that one category -- skin color -- gets complicated, but because the first wave of perception in this country is of skin color, I could accept the tempting comfort of dominant culture. I could say the story of Michael Brown is a tragedy but that it doesn't apply to me. And I'd be wrong. Not just because I'm the parent of a child of color, but because I'm a citizen of this country, and I want it to change. I can do something about it (read "12 Things White People Can Do"). Every day that I teach middle school social studies, I push my students to see the connections between then and now, to ask questions and more questions about what has shaped and continues to shape this country. There's always more I can do, but getting the next generation to ask questions seems like an important start.
Just now, I sat at the foot of my daughter's bed and watched her sleep awhile. She looked so perfectly peaceful, secure beneath her purple comforter, surrounded by a crowd of stuffed animals. I don't know what to tell her about this country I've given her. I don't know how to keep her safe. I don't know how to explain why, yes, even now I believe things could get better. They do, here. Again and again, history's surprised us like that. It all begins with a few voices demanding justice.
Mitike's voice will be one of those, I'm certain. And maybe strengthening that voice is the most important job I have.
