Reclaiming Our Way promoting the well-being of African American children & families

The Other ‘Talk’ We Must Have With Our Children – “We Must Continue to Fight for Justice!”

The Jordan Davis case led some parents to give their kids “the talk.”
But doing so absolves white people of their responsibility to unlearn stereotypes that scare them.

- Tonyaa Weathersbee, 02 12 14 @ The Root

There was a piece posted on The Root last week that captures my exact sentiments about the continuing injustices we face - more specifically our children, at the hands of white adults who claim to fear them.

The main point is that we have to be very clear about the messages we send our children when we only tell them to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, and to be overly deferential to white people they come across, be it on the street, in a place of business, in their own neighborhood, or in a local gas station parking lot.

Yes, we have to teach our children how to survive in a racist society. But we also have to teach them how to organize and resist so that ours, theirs and generations yet unborn can be guaranteed a brighter future.

This is not a game.

For all of you who have children, be they little girls or little boys... you know the stakes.

And the stakes is high!

Here's a brief excerpt from Tonyaa Weathersbee's article at The Root.

In the 2002 book Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, Charles Gratton recalled his mother’s instructions when she sent him to the grocery store. She told him, “If you pass any white people on your way, get off the sidewalk. Give them the sidewalk. Don’t challenge white people.”

Similarly, many black people who grew up during Jim Crow times remember being told not to look white people in the eye and to avoid doing things that might get them hurt or killed for being defiant or, as they would say back then, uppity.

A refusal to turn down music or take off a hoodie could translate into being uppity for whites like Dunn, who believe that black youths—who, like many of their white counterparts, are grappling with awkwardness and immaturity—owe it to them to suppress their attitude.

They don’t.

I get that it’s important to give black youths the advice they need to be able to live to fight another day, as Guns and others are doing. But we cannot forget the importance of fighting conditions, such as Florida’s “Stand your ground” law, that feed the idea that whites like Dunn can get away with fatally shooting a black youth like Jordan because he and his friends didn’t comply with their request.

We cannot forget, because something is horribly wrong when, more than a half-century after legal segregation ended, when we have a black man sitting in the Oval Office, Jim Crow-era instructions are being revived to protect black youths. These instructions have little to do with young black people being respectful to white strangers and everything to do with them being submissive to whites—with black youths giving white strangers permission to cling to fears about blackness by not being so, well, black.

And when we make black youths solely responsible for not frightening white people with their music or their style of dress or their swagger, we absolve white people of their responsibility to unlearn the stereotypes that are scaring them.

We cannot forget—because if we do, the next thing you know, we’ll be telling our kids to give up the sidewalk to white people.

Again.