SK, let’s say you live in a country where 99.9% of the people are race A and 0.1% are race B. And 99.9% of the criminals are race B and 0.1% are race A. And you live in a part of town where there are a hundred thousand residents, but there aren’t more than 2 or 3 residents who are of race B. You’re watching your children play in the culdesac where you live from the upstairs window of your house. A man of race B walks into the culdesac. Are you more anxious about that than if a man of race A walks into the culdesac?
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Except that’s not the country we live in. Roughly 15% of the population has black skin. The vast majority of them are not criminals.
When I lived in Carmel Valley, I lived on that cul de sac. There weren’t any black families living on the street while I lived there, but there were some in the neighborhood. One of them played in my son’s band. They practiced in my music room for about 6 years. By the time they all got their driver’s licenses, my driveway was filled with cars every weekend. Despite the horrible sound coming from my house, the neighbors were very nice, none of them ever complained. But twice the police showed up. Both times following a suspicious black kid driving through the neighborhood. Both times they questioned him for 10 or 15 minutes about what he was doing in the neighborhood in which he lived. Never happened with any of the white kids, despite the fact that a few of them didn’t live anywhere near our neighborhood.
Now you might claim that the police were just doing their job, investigating suspicious behavior. But the important thing here is not whether you think it was the appropriate thing to do. The important thing, and this is what Obama was talking about, is the effect of these kinds of events on black teenagers and black men. This kid wasn’t doing anything wrong, he was simply living his life exactly the same as his 5 or 6 bandmates were doing. The only difference is that for a black kid, living his life, exactly the same as his white friends is suspicious behavior. Driving down the street is suspicious behavior. And it is in this context that the reaction to the Martin shooting arose.
Neither this kid, nor his parents, who lived right around the corner from me, have any control over what happens in other neighborhoods. They can’t stop the gang activities in other parts of town. And neither should they be targets of law enforcement or community watchdogs because of what happens elsewhere. But they are. So when I hear these BS arguments that black leaders are “making it a racial thing”, my skin crawls. They aren’t “making it a racial thing”. It IS a racial thing. They live with it every single day.
