Trayvon Martin and the Burden of Black Parents

For those who haven’t heard (mostly non-American readers, I would assume), Trayvon Martin was a black teenager killed by what seems to have been an overzealous neighborhood watch volunteer. He was walking near his father’s house, talking on his cellphone and carrying a soda and a bag of candy, when a neighbor decided that he looked suspicious. The neighbor, whose volunteer post charged him with watching for suspicious activity and notifying police, did call 911.

Against the instructions of the emergency operator, however, he chose to pursue and confront Martin. The confrontation ended with the unarmed Martin shot dead. Obviously the killer, George Zimmerman, has his own side of the story, but it’s hard to believe the young man’s skin color had nothing to do with Zimmerman’s decision that he was up to no good. In other words, a black teenager minding his own business was taken for a criminal, confronted, and ultimately killed.

We may never know for certain what role the color of Martin’s skin played in the circumstances leading up to his death, but this case and the intense media coverage of it highlight how real the fear of racial profiling is for African-American parents. The coverage has been full of parents of black children, including President Obama, talking about they felt it could have been their child and how they worry that their children, especially their boys, will find themselves harmed or imprisoned because of some innocent behavior that a police officer interprets in the wrong way.

I’m neither black nor a parent, but what I find so compelling about this is that it exposes a significant cultural rift between black and white Americans. I doubt it’s news to many African-Americans that black parents worry about their sons inadvertently getting in trouble with the police through some seemingly benign behavior. Hopefully the nationally televised testimony of such parents brings this point home for white parents for whom such fear is not a daily reality.

This fear is but one of the many cultural differences that continue to separate black and white Americans, the sort of thing that never occurs to members of one group but is widely understood or believed by the other. That such differences continue to exist between these two groups, who are in so many ways neighbors, friends, and co-workers, demonstrates the progress that we as a nation still have to make, even in this “Age of Obama”. Perhaps not coincidentally, black comedy duo Key & Peele recently performed a sketch about how police officers would treat Obama if he weren’t the president.

For me, the worried black parents remind me of a community meeting I attended several years ago in Roxbury, an historically black neighborhood in Boston. The meeting, designed to give neighborhood residents the opportunity to question and share concerns with area police officers, was held at a Boston Debate League high school, which is how I ended up there.

I distinctly remember one black woman in particular rising to voice her concern. She believed that Roxbury police treated groups of black teenagers with suspicion, often approaching them for questioning or disbursing them when they congregated on a street corner or near a train station. She began to cry as she explained that, although her son wasn’t involved with drugs or gangs, she feared that he might one day get in trouble simply for walking down the street with his friends. What if a police officer approached them and accused them of a crime? What if her son or one of his friends rolled his eyes or muttered something under his breath? What if the officer thought her son did something like that, even if he didn’t? He could be beaten, arrested…. Her crying became more uncontrollable, and she had to sit down.

What was most remarkable about all this was that I knew this woman: she was the headmaster of the school hosting the meeting, I woman I’d dealt with frequently and who’d been very helpful and supportive of my efforts to start a debate team at her school. I knew her to be a proud, professional, and self-possessed woman, not the sort to lose her temper or get upset easily. Yet here she was losing her composure in front of dozens of students and parents from her school. Clearly this issue resonated with her in a deeply emotional way. Of course I knew that racial profiling was a big concern in many black communities, but watching her sob during this meeting hammered home just how powerful and widespread the fear was.

These tearful parents also reminded me of a passage from Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent The Warmth of Other Suns. In the Jim Crow south, black children could be assaulted or killed for minor, perceived slights to white people. Consequently, black parents had to be extremely strict in teaching their children, from a young age, to demonstrate the deference that was expected of them: to never look white people in the eye, to step off of the sidewalk if a white person approached, and certainly never to say or do anything remotely disrespectful. Surely many resented playing the role of enforcers of the system that oppressed them, but they were driven by fear for the safety of their children.

I’m aware that many white Americans today think that racial profiling is a thing of the past, that minorities who worry about it are overly paranoid or making excuses. Although I disagree with that view, I hope that even those who hold will come to see that this concern about profiling is not a fringe belief. It is shared by millions of American parents. It is for them a fact of life, a belief that influences their daily behavior, not simply a bugaboo invoked to stir up sympathy or express discontent. Regardless of its veracity, the mere existence of such a belief, along with the fact that it is so widely shared by black Americans and so widely unknown by white Americans, is in itself troubling to me, as a white American.