White Mama

On July 6th, my teenage, African-American son said to his younger brother and sister,

“Police kill black people.”

And these are the stupid, white-mama words that I said.  

“That’s not true.”  

“Don’t teach your brother to be afraid.”

“Don’t contribute to prejudice by stereotyping all police officers.”

Then I went home and saw the news reports and learned that in fact,

it is true,

he and his little brother have every right to be afraid,

and that this stereotyping is founded in reality.  

I wanted to drive back along the route that we had just driven as I soap boxed through issues of prejudice and racism as if I knew a damn thing and find the words that flew from my mouth to his ears, to his heart, and catch them.  Catch them, erase them, swallow them back up, unsay them.  Those devastating, you don’t get it words.  

I don’t get it.  I won’t get it.  I can’t get it.  

Because this thinking, this systemic racism that he lives with and encounters daily but I can only hear about and read about, is foreign to me.  I don’t get it.  I don’t want to believe it is real.  It shocks me and baffles me every time and I sit and say, “surely, not” and “it can’t be”.  I sit in my naive bubble of white privilege and pretend that it does not exist.  Sitting here in my skin, I have that luxury.  I know quite literally nothing about what it is to be a young black man yet I am charged with raising one and clearly, I don’t know what I’m doing.  I am a naive little white woman skipping around in my pretty privilege.  It’s almost a joke that this is my job- to raise this boy.  And he knows it.  

After the stupid words flew out of my mouth, he had to get away from me.  Of course he did.  I fumbled out the false and impossible words of, “I understand” and then I stupidly said, “...but...” and he graciously replied, “ok”.  He practiced restraint in his response to me.  Just like he knows he has to do and will always have to do to protect himself and to stay alive.  Such control.  He has already learned such control.  Tragically, he gets to practice with me.