By Gregory Alonso Pirio and Annette Sheckler
Greg Pirio and Annette Sheckler: As white parents of African-American sons, it is important for us to speak out about the systemic violence that boys and men of color face in the United States of America. The highly-publicized police shootings, which began in Ferguson, Missouri with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown and more recently with the 2016 killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge of and Philando Castileand in St. Paul, make this imperative.
Because we have black sons, we have come to more fully identify with the fears that our African-American brothers and sisters have regarding their children, especially their male children, and the righteous anger they feel regarding the persistent racism and violence they face. In telling our own stories, we want our audience, especially its white members, to also identify with what our African American brothers and sisters must deal with. It is our hope that we can contribute, even in a small way, to ending the “othering” that has permitted centuries-old patterns of racial violence that began with the slave trade to persist into the twenty-first century. “A more perfect union” requires that we lose this sense of the other and redefine community in a way that embraces all of our children regardless of the hues of their skin.
Greg Pirio: As an adult, I had always been sensitive to racial oppression, becoming an anti-apartheid activist while a graduate student at UCLA. However, raising my African-American son in America drove my concerns about the impact of racial oppression into recesses of my heart where it caused hurt and apprehension at a level of intimacy that I never experienced before.
The first time that it really hit me that Alonso’s experience with America may, in some regards, be fundamentally different than mine occurred when he was seven years old. With a tone expressing great concern, Alonso blurted out, “Dad, why haven’t there been any African American presidents?” In the quiet of my mind, I thought, “how did this kid learn about racial exclusion at such a tender age.” I found it incredulous that this discovery was part of his second-grade curriculum at Kentwood Elementary School in Los Angeles. So, I simply asked him, “how did you learn this?” He replied, “I was looking at the poster of the U.S. Presidents in our classroom, and I saw that they were all white.”
I felt no choice but to tell him about the history of slavery and racial oppression in America as well as the heroic struggle of people of color to overcome this legacy. He was still at such a tender age, and somehow in speaking these truths to him at such a tender age, I silently acknowledged that I was depriving him of some innocence. That “whites-only” presidential poster was likely his first encounter of the meaning of blackness in America.
So, you can imagine his sheer delight when in 2007 – Alonso age 10 – rejoiced at the election of the first African American president. Alonso felt this connection with Barack Obama as the first black president but also because, like the president-elect, Alonso is Kenyan American. Alonso’s mom had even been housemates with President Obama’s sister, Auma, at a Nairobi boarding school, making Obama’s election even more meaningful. And then curiously, I too, while planning a medical distance learning initiative in Kenya, was touched by the President’s Kenya family, befriending the President’s uncle, Said — a man of dazzling intelligence like his nephew, Barack. Alonso’s joy at the President’s election left me with little doubt that the election of the first African-American president helped Alonso to widen his opportunity horizon at a profound and never-spoken-of level.
Annette Sheckler: Like Greg, I am the white mother of an African-American child. Up until last year on Labor Day, I was more concerned with my son maintaining his identity with Ethiopia than with his race—and then I was not. My son’s connection with Ethiopia is just second nature to a boy surrounded by Ethiopian family friends, wears a gabi—Ethiopian blanket—around the house, and prefers ingera to McDonalds. Yet, race is more complicated because, I think, his mother and his extended family are primarily white. At present, there is no sense of “other” because he is the spoiled child of a mother who dotes on him and an extended family who, because he is the youngest, dotes on him as well.
The first time we encountered the race issue was his first day of first grade in Arlington, Virginia. We had just returned from a year-and-a half living in Ethiopia where he had attended British international school. Though the school was predominately Ethiopian, his best friend was a Scottish boy, and when at our home in Addis Ababa, he was often at the center of the neighborhood band of Ethiopian children. Clearly, he had a balanced perspective on race and ethnicity.
His first day of school in the U.S., however, was marked by what I felt was an anomaly in Arlington’s racial and ethnically diverse community. The little white girl next to him said that she was not allowed to play with black children. I met with his teacher, and she let me know that she would talk to the little girl and her family. My son seemed satisfied with our discussion about race and put this episode behind him.
On Labor Day last year, however, the ugly specter of racism raised itself again in the form of a neighbor. We knew this neighbor slightly because I had on several occasions asked that he watch his language around the children while swimming in the apartment complex’s pool. He had no boundaries when it came to loud vulgarity after hours of drinking by the pool. On Labor Day, however, we were unlucky enough to share a barbeque area for the traditional end-of-summer send-off. I told the children to stay away from him because they had come to us on several occasions, saying Sean was being mean to them.
As the evening drew to a close, and we were packing up, Sean was sitting on the ground unable to get up undoubtedly the result of his drunkenness. When he pointed his middle finger at the astonished children, I said to him that they were kids and to please stop. And then it happened. He managed to not only stand up but to scream invectives and me and my son—using the “n-word” five times and threatening to strangle his “n-word” head.
I was stunned. He then flung a cup of red wine at my son, but I was able to deflect it with my leg. For a moment, I considered throwing hot coals at him in a fury I had never before felt against a human being. I wanted to hurt him. Instead, I told his boyfriend to get him out of there or I would call the police. My son had never heard the “n-word’ before, so he focused on the other vulgarities thrown at him. When we returned upstairs to our apartment and talked about what happened, I felt that whatever I could say fell short of comforting him. For the first time, he experienced unmistaken cruelty in the world.
I quickly transformed my anger at the abuse into resolve to seek justice, and so, the next morning I called the police. Two police officers—both white—came to our apartment and my son told them what happened. They walked down the hallway to talk to Sean, but he had left for work. His boyfriend told the police where he worked, and he was arrested that day on an existing bench warrant for theft. He was also charged with assault and battery on me and my son.
We went to court, and my eight-year-old son testified against Sean. I have never been so proud of my child. Sean’s lawyer was crude in attempting to imply perjury in my son’s testimony. When Sean’s lawyer asked my son what his mother told him to say, my son replied, “Say, ‘yes sir and yes ma’am and to just tell the truth’.” Sean was found guilty of a hate crime and sentenced to six months in jail—suspended if he attended counseling for substance abuse.
As parents, we are all looking for the “teachable moment” for our children. In this case, I had hoped that the American criminal justice system—from the police to the judge—would teach my son that his rights would be protected. The police, in this case, were there to protect him. The judge, in this case, was there to mete out punishment to the person who violated his rights. Fortunately, the system worked.
The “How to Deal with the Police” Moment
Greg Pirio: One day when Alonso was attending Paul Revere Middle School, he told me that he wanted to hang out with friends at a nearby strip mall. This was a first: a teenager now, he was graduating into adulthood and being on his own completely unsupervised, and for my part, I envisioned him as the only black kid hanging out in a white, affluent area of Santa Monica. I knew he had to have that talk that African American parents have with their sons – the how-to-behave-with-the-police talk.
But what did I know? I was white – first generation American of French, Spanish and Italian heritage. The police had always been my friends. So, I elicited the help of a friend of longstanding – Anthony Lee, who is African American and an accomplished poet. Together Tony and I planned a lunch scenario with Alonso during which Tony was to explain how to behave with the police.
I began the conversation by asking Tony how he advised his own sons, when they became teenagers, about how to behave with the police. Tony said that he told them, “never to argue, never to say no, always to smile, to nod their heads in affirmation even if his sons were in the right.” The conversation went on for some time, and Alonso was taking it all in. Then later I reinforced with Alonso that if he ever saw police cars when he was out with friends to go into a Starbucks, a Panera, or any other type of restaurant to buy a soft drink and to wait until the police had departed before venturing out again.
Annette Sheckler: After Trayvon Martin was killed, I began to think more intensely about how society might change their perception about my son when he becomes a teenager. For now, his coltish body, cherubic face and toothy smile charm everyone around him. He is endearing, sweet and exceptionally polite. But what about when he is 15 and wearing a hoodie with low slung jeans—or whatever is the fashion in six years for young men trying on their manhood. Will that white woman ahead of him on the sidewalk—physically resembling his mother in so many ways—cross the street in fear of my son? Will the white man at the ATM machine pause before making his transaction, deliberating on whether or not my son is carrying a gun ready to point at him and take his money? And what about the police? Right now, my son still sees the police as his friend, there to help him and protect him from the bad guys. But what about when my son gets older, and the police think he is one of the bad guys? When will I have to ask an African-American male friend to talk to my son about how to act around the police?
Fear of Black Males
Greg Pirio: After Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, President Obama captured my feelings, when he said “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.” The strident determination of Martin’s assassin briefly put into the public arena the issue of a pervasive white fear of black men. This cannot be denied. Just the other day, I overheard two white teenagers in California talking. The younger one, perhaps 13 years of age, was telling his friend, a few years older, how scared he had been earlier in the week sitting on the bus next to “this big black dude.”
This irrational fear of black men extends to even older black men. Another African American friend and colleague — a distinguished university professor from SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York, Ricardo Laremont — reminded me that this fear extended not only to young black men. A young white police officer recently pulled over Ricardo while he was driving a Prius in Vestal, New York. Ricardo knew that he had made no illegal moves while driving and immediately realized that he had been pulled over for “driving while black.” Ricardo knew not to argue and used humor to get the officer laughing. Laughing with the officer, Ricardo did, however, make the mistake of touching the officer’s shoulder in what Ricardo thought was a gesture of camaraderie. The officer did not interpret Ricardo’s touch in the same light; he pulled out a taser, prompting Ricardo to tell the officer, “I’m 57 years old; you could kill me with that thing.”
This irrational white fear of black men has allowed state and national political figures to adopt policies that have led to incarceration black men, and increasingly black women, at staggeringly repressive levels, making a mockery of our country’s pretense to fairness and blind justice.
The American tradition of black disempowerment and racial violence graphically came home to me in 2004 when I observed a spectacle at a Washington, DC detention center. I saw about 10 black inmates with feet and wrists shackled in plastic restraints. With their hands tied behind their backs and restraints connecting them one to another, this group of modern-day captives shuffled toward the van that was waiting to transport them to another facility. My heart leaped and tears came to my eyes! The sight could have easily been one of the wood-etched slave auction posters from America’s slave period. “How little distance we have travelled,” I thought. “How much work we have to do.” And I felt guilty, if not ashamed, for having zealously protested apartheid in far-off South Africa, and for not mobilizing against modern racial injustice in my own land.
Greg Pirio and Annette Scheckler: In her insightful, must-read 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander convincingly explains how the War on Drugs begun during the Reagan administration had disproportionately led to this mass incarceration of black people and was apparently designed for the political motivation of undoing the gains of the Civil Rights Era.
Michelle Alexander highlights the horrific consequences of the Drug Laws on the United States, especially on our African American brothers and sisters. According to her, “In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug conviction accounting for the majority of the increase.” The United States imprisons more of its population than repressive regimes like Russia, China and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for each 100,000 adults; in the our country, the figure is 750 per 100,000. In our nation’s capital, “three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”
In recent years, some of these injustices have been reversed at state and federal levels. In 2013, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, announced a major shift in criminal justice policy to ease overcrowding in federal prisons by ordering prosecutors to omit listing quantities of illegal substances in indictments for low-level drug cases, sidestepping federal laws that impose strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.
Appeal to America
Greg Pirio and Annette Sheckler: Our conclusion is that America must end its “othering” and embrace all its children and stop allowing unspeakable things to happen to children and adults from the “other” community. The concept of race is a long-outdated invention that needs to be uprooted from our consciousness and vocabulary, and the concept of race need to be replaced with feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood. We are asking our white brothers and sisters, “how would they like it if your children were treated in such abominable ways?” We are asking you to reach out and embrace the other as if he or she were your own. Like Annette transformed her anger into resolve to seek justice, let us all vow to embrace all children as our own. “It takes a nation to raise a child.”
Authors
Dr. Pirio has been a global leader in the use of communications for constructive social change, trained historian of Africa and a recognized authority on jihadism in Africa. He currently directs EC Associates (Empowering Communications), a firm which focuses on an array of health advocacy, public relations, branding, media development, communications, and distance education issues with a strong emphasis in the areas of health, governance and conflict resolution issues.
Annette Sheckler is a political scientist specializing in the politics of East Africa. She has worked in the field of international development for more than twenty-five years. She has written extensively on conflict, media, public health, humanitarian assistance and gender