From the minute they are born, we’re stressed. Once we leave the hospital, the real anxiety starts. You just can’t believe they let you walk out of the hospital with a whole human being and you’re responsible for them. We’ve all jumped up to check to make sure they’re breathing in the middle of the night. We worry if their nap lasts a little too long. As they grow, you try to teach them all the good things. Your aim is to give them the best life possible.
Black Sons and the Shift
If you have a son, things take another turn. As he gets older and people start to notice how tall he is getting, a whole other type of fear takes over. You know that very soon, people won’t see the baby in your baby’s face. They’ll see a man. In some cases, they’ll see a threat.
You see how easily that shift happens and you worry every time your child is out of your sight. He wants to ride his bike through the neighborhood or go meet his friends at the park and you worry. You don’t want to stop your child from being a kid. You don’t want to put them in a position of always being scared to just live.
At the same time, it’s reality. It’s a horrible part of the parallel universe we exist in as Black people. There’s a whole set of unwritten rules that we follow. It’s the oral history we pass down from one generation to the next. It’s like a green book for living that exists in our heads because we know things aren’t fair and in too many cases they don’t work in our favor.
Ralph Yarl
As we all learned Ralph Yarl’s name last week, we couldn’t help but wish we’d met him differently. He was sent to pick up his siblings from a friend’s home. He ended up at the wrong address, through a simple error. After knocking on the door he wasn’t met with someone answering the door, he was met with bullets. Two of them. One that landed in his head. A white man in his 80s shot this 16-year-old kid. The man gave a statement to the police and was allowed to go back home. It wasn’t until attorneys and social media got involved that charges were even filed.
Thankfully, Ralph is a survivor. He’s truly a miracle. He spent some time in the hospital and now he’s at home and expected to make a full recovery. He’s no doubt forever changed by this. He’ll need so much time to heal and process.
There were so many other circumstances that would have led us to know the name Ralph Yarl. Or maybe he would have just remained anonymous to those of us, not in his world. That would have been perfectly fine. There are so many names we could have learned under different, better circumstances. So many stories unfinished and cut short. Thankfully, his isn’t one of those.