“I can’t fully trust you,” she said, my Black friend, “because you are White, and so you always have a choice about when you are done with all this racial justice.”
Her statement hurt. Not because I didn’t think she should have said it, but because I knew it was fair that she did.
Months later, at the American Academy of Psychotherapists National Institute and Conference, I would say this to Dr. Dorothy Evans Holmes, one of the keynote speakers, when she passed by our breakout group.
“Tell her not to give up on you,” Dr. Holmes encouraged. “Otherwise we don’t get anywhere.”
At this point, I want to give up on me.
It started for us around 7 p.m., or was it 8 p.m.? Anyway, it hasn’t been my whole life as it has been for some.
We had put our youngest son to sleep and I came down to find my husband and our almost-five year old building forts and Lego cars. I sat for a moment to read Twitter as there had been an odd feeling in the air since we came home and rushed to relieve our nanny, who is Black, early, to make sure she wasn’t caught in the curfew.
Curfew.
Something I have always associated with South Africa and apartheid or something that happens in other cities due to natural disasters. In South Africa, I understood them to be bad, but in some cases, I had thought, they were to keep people safe.
I had not fully comprehended them, fully, consciously, until last night, as a tool for quelling protest, for controlling people, for violence.
I am so naive. So sheltered. So White.
I had been debating, for a few days, how and if to talk to my 4 year old about what is happening. He isn’t in school so there is nowhere for him to pick up any information. Yet, memes on Facebook and anti-racist writers are telling me it is necessary that I pro-actively share age-appropriate information about protests and power and race so that he won’t be the next Amy Cooper.
As my friend noted, I have a choice in this all. His skin makes this my option, my think-project, not a matter of his life and death.
I waded into the topic the day prior when we were riding his bike and his electric horn clicked over to police sirens and shooting sounds. I explained to him that we couldn’t play the police sirens or shooting sounds around other people because the police sometimes hurt people with Black skin, like our nanny’s, more than people with White skin, like ours, and so the sounds scare some people.
I was far more nervous than I expected when saying this to him. I was shaking.
He paused. Thinking. “Well, why would they put the sound on the machine then?”
“I don’t know, baby. And you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not your fault.”
I felt both as if I had done something wrong and right at the same time. Fundamentally though, I was deliberately stealing my baby’s innocence when I didn’t have to. That is a sick feeling as a parent.
And yet, I am aware, that for me it is a choice. For Black mothers, it is not.
The choice ended last night, June 1, 2020, around 7 or 8 p.m. Sitting reading Twitter and trying to ascertain if it was true that we were all going to come out at 11 p.m. with Black Lives Matter signs, and how that would help anything, I was distracted by siren lights and turned to see what seemed like 15 MPD cars with sirens on race up 15th Street, in front of our house.
Our house that suddenly felt like a fortress of White privilege.
“What the hell?”
My son attempted to make sense of things. “Oh, I bet they are going to find people who are not wearing their masks for the virus.”
I had the nervous, sick feeling again. A feeling that I was beginning to feel viscerally and understand for the first time to be 1/1 millionth of what Black mothers must feel all the time. It was the worst compilation of emotions I think I have ever felt.
I could nod and let it go. I had that choice.
“Come here, baby,” I said. “Let me talk to you. This isn’t about the virus. Something else is happening.”
He chose to stay near his fort.
I remembered some language from the anti-racist parenting Facebook memes and the titles of kids’ books I’d just ordered that day, wondering how on earth I’d introduce them to him since they’d be so far removed from his reality. This seemed funny now.
I did my best.
“Do you remember when I told you about the police and how they sometimes hurt Black people?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what is happening now is the police hurt a Black man very badly.” (I had the choice to minimize the number and I did. And the act, and I did.) So now, people are protesting. Do you know what a protest is?”
“No.”
“It’s where people carry signs and try to tell the police and their leaders to do something differently and what they think. Protesting is good, because sometimes it helps people behave better. But sometimes it makes the police mad, so they try to stop or hurt the protestors, and that is what is happening.”
He pauses. Says what he’s been saying a lot to me, usually about my rules. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, baby, it doesn’t. Come here. I want you to see.”
He comes to sit with me at our bay window overlooking 15th Street NW, in Washington, D.C. The protestors start walking peaceably down the street. They are quiet. I send my husband out to read the situation. To my son, I point out the signs and how the protestors are the helpers who are trying to make people behave better. See, they aren’t scary or doing anything wrong.”
The police begin to swarm. I take my son to the door and ask my husband if it’s safe to bring him out.
My husband is better at reading these kinds of situations than I am.
“They are corralling them,” he says, in this voice shaky way that is a mix of fear and tears. Normally he has it when watching T.V. I know it well. Often I chide him gently for it. Not because he’s emotional, but because he tends to try to hide it. And he’s so bad at that part.
My son makes sense of the situation and my explanation that the police want to stop the protestors and put them in jail by saying, “Mom, this is suspicious!”
He is at that age when things are suspicious and you go on missions and look for clues. I vividly remember being that age and the yards in suburban Kansas City where I looked for clues. I know he will remember this.
“I know what’s going on!” he exclaims. “These aren’t REAL police. They are fake!”
The ability of a 4-year old to work out cognitive dissonance is astounding. The mind cannot tolerate the good guys being the bad guys. It is too terrifying.
This is why children grow up not understanding that their parents were abusive, even if they were. Because it is easier to be abused and harmed and think you did something to deserve it than to live with the terror that your caregivers are bad.
My heart is breaking into a thousand pieces. This is not a conversation I want to be having with my child. It is not a conversation I want any mother having with her child.
I decide it’s enough, because I have that choice. I usher my son to the TV room, away from the windows, and put on Chad Wild Clay and Project Zorgo. I bring him Goldfish crackers and chocolate milk and wrap him in a blanket and tell him I’ll come check on him.
My husband and I go out front, periodically trading off to look in on him and video what is happening. I tell my husband to stay close to the house while I venture out.
I am a protector, after all, to a degree.
I go as far as the sidewalk in front of our neighbor’s house. I am pulled in one part to move closer to the police and the protest, which remains peaceful, and in the other direction, home, to my children.
The choices I have at every moment are exhausting. And I cannot imagine the exhaustion of not having these choices.
This goes on for hours.
Video, Tweet names of people being arrested, go get Cheez-Its and check on son, video, read Twitter. I can’t put him to bed anyway because the lights and sirens are still too loud at the front of the house, where the bedroom is.
At some point I would see the post that what we thought had happened had. Police had corralled people down Swann Street and they’d taken shelter in a neighbor’s house. Then the horror: the police had tear gassed the house. Inside the house. A private residence. Who had invited folks in. Now the police were sending people to the door lying and impersonating others to try to get access.
Someone inside called 911 and needs medical attention.
Etc. Etc.
There were young kids in the house. Teenagers. The only crime they had committed had been walking down the street holding Black Lives Matter signs at 7:15 p.m. and chanting “George Floyd” and “Hands up, don’t shoot.” They were peaceful. They were disciplined. In the reflection of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. You couldn’t have asked for a more well-behaved protest.
And the police lurked outside all night. Until the curfew was lifted at 6 a.m. Trying to prevent food from coming in (they were finally able to get pizza). Intimidating. Scaring. Lying.
This was a protest of police brutality. The response was police terrorizing teenagers.
The protestors in my neighbor, Ruhal’s, home. cleaned it up before leaving.
How many thousands of dollars were spent on this? What a waste. What an utter lack of imagination. A complete betrayal of justice and and an unnecessary infliction of trauma and pain.
As I write I realize I forgot to mention the weaponry. The first I saw was a baton, wielded, by an officer approaching a peaceful group chanting, in unison, without moving, “George Floyd.”
Why wield that weapon? There was no threat.
Then the rubber bullet guns. I don’t know what they’re called. They’re bigger than I imagined.
Then the three men in different uniforms. I learned from Twitter maybe FBI. Maybe Park Police. They had rifles.
Guns, I realized. Real guns. I had never been this close to real guns, wielded.
My first instinct, laughably: This is getting out of hand, someone needs to call for help. Someone needs to call…the police.
FUCK.
There is no one to call.
This is the terror, I realize, of Black people, and Black mothers, every. day.
There is no one to call.
In my office, as a therapist, I hear many well-intended White people say that their feelings don’t matter. They are trying, very hard, and genuinely, to be good. I know I’m privileged, I’m fine. My feelings are irrelevant.
But I understand at some moment in this night, deeply, that we have to feel these feelings. We have to feel the terror and the fear and the outrage and the indignity and the helplessness and the sadness and the heartbreak.
Because if we don’t, we cannot empathize, we cannot walk with, we cannot join Black people who experience this every day.
To be clear, we never can truly know their experience. But it is our duty, I believe, to drop our defenses and to feel what we can. We need to acknowledge that it is a fraction of what Black people feel, but we White people have to feel it. Our feelings, our experience, our living this, is the only way to end it.
We must live and feel into White Supremacy and its costs to begin to take it apart.
At some point, we close our door and I take my son upstairs. He won’t sleep otherwise, my night owl boy, unless we are all upstairs and safe.
How lucky he is to know such safety. But that is a thing I will tell him on another day. This is enough for now. We get to choose when to shut out door, I always keep in mind.
The police presence has died down, we think. I put my son to sleep with a story about Mario and Luigi and then look out the window. My husband is with our youngest, who will wake multiple times due to the sound of helicopters and maybe the smell of weed and tear gas in the air.
Did I forget the tear gas? At once point I could feel it, faintly, on the stoop. Smell it. All the smells entered our home through the front door, which we kept open while we were downstairs.
To see out? To escape to?
Out the window I see three police cars and police tape across 15th Street. My husband comes back.
“Maybe it’s over?” I say.
My husband, who is better at logistical things, says, “I think they are waiting for them. They backed away to make it seem they aren’t there. It’s a trap.”
“Why would they do that?” I remember what my son said. “This doesn’t make sense.”
It’s 1 a.m. now, I think.
At some point I fall asleep, wondering if we would have let the protestors in. Occasionally I remember there is a pandemic going on. It’s easy to forget. That feels like eons ago.
I plan to sleep in, as I don’t work until 2 p.m.
But our youngest is up at 6:30 and I am up with him though my husband takes him downstairs while I read Twitter. I try to sleep again. I can’t. I go downstairs and remove two lawn signs, one for someone running for City Council member and one for essential workers.
I tape paper over the signs and start new ones. On one, I silently write, “Black Lives Matter.” When our nanny comes in, she says, “Oh, thank you.”
We tell her what happened last night. She is shocked.
On the other I write, “Shame on you Bowser (our Mayor)/DCMPD.”
I take the signs back outside.
I say to my husband, “I think we have to talk about what happens if the protestors need our house.”
I have been weighing this. I want to not have any doubts. But I am aware of the pandemic. Mostly I am aware of the idea of my babies being tear gassed.
“I think we would need to do what Rahul did.”
I am relieved. And I love my husband even more than before in that moment.
“I’m worried about the boys being tear gassed,” I say. I start to think. “Wait, we have a yard. We could take the boys to the yard. Or have the protestors in the yard. Safer for everyone from COVID and harder to gas.”
We have a plan.
I am also aware, we always have a choice.