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My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. Just White Supremacy Lives Within Me 02:56

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The author, Calvin Hennick, and his son. (Courtesy)

My son is 9 years old. He'south big and beautiful and biracial, and although my wife and I accept e'er known nosotros would need to prepare him to confront racism, we've never talked to him or his little sister about police violence against Black people. Not until at present.

He wept when we told him nearly George Floyd. His vocalisation shaking, he asked whether the same thing would one day happen to him.

My wife and I told him to draw about his feelings, and what he brought back to united states broke both our hearts. In pen, he'd drawn a white law officer standing in front of a cruiser, holding upwardly a smoking gun and looking downwardly at an unseen corpse. My son had written the words "Killed Me," with an pointer pointing down at his own body, lying lifeless simply outside the frame of the page.

There's nothing my son can exercise to forestall this nightmare from becoming a reality. There's nada he tin do to change the way the world will see him when he grows into a tall, broad-shouldered Black homo.

To protect my son, and every other Black boy and girl in America, white people must change the way our ain eyes see the world. We must exercise the work of stamping out white supremacy where information technology lives: in our systems, and in ourselves.

In that location's cypher my son can do to prevent this nightmare from becoming a reality.

In 2007, less than a year after I moved to Boston, a 22-year-quondam woman named Chiara Levin was killed by a stray bullet, caught in the crossfire between two gang members at a party in Dorchester. I followed the news on the radio for a calendar week or then, never seeing a photograph of the victim's face. Unconsciously, I assumed that she was Black. When I finally saw her picture in the newspaper — this smiling, pretty white girl with wild, curly hair — I thought: Oh.

In that location was a lot to unpack in that "Oh." Beneath my unspoken assumption nearly her race was some other assumption: She was the type of person who attended parties with gang members. And beneath that: On some level, it makes sense that she was killed.

And so, even deeper, in a dark part of my mind that I didn't even know was there: Her life was less valuable than a white person's.

When I realized what was happening in my own brain, I shuddered. I wasn't what anyone would describe as a racist. I was engaged to a Black adult female whom I would ally subsequently that year, and who would become the mother of my ii children. Simply white supremacy had infected me in ways I'd never realized.

I've lived my entire life in a earth filled with literal monuments to racism, a world where we regularly make unspoken justifications for living on land stolen from ethnic people, for honoring slave owners on our coin, for tolerating enormous racial gaps in wealth and education and health outcomes. Fifty-fifty my awareness of Chiara Levin's murder is an case of white supremacy in action; if she'd been Black, I dubiety the news media would have latched onto her story. Journalists saw her white face up, and the same thing that happened in my encephalon happened in theirs. Of all the murder victims in Boston, this is the one who matters, the white supremacist inside them whispered. This is the tragedy we will talk nearly for weeks, while the names of murdered Black men and women become unspoken.

I confess that there'south still a part of me that tries to wait for "reasonable explanations" when I get-go hear of a Black person dying in police custody. A part of me looks to explain away the horrible things I don't desire to confront. If I'yard going to be a part of the solution, this is the piece of me I need to destroy.

I confess that there'southward nonetheless a part of me that tries to look for 'reasonable explanations' when I start hear of a Black person dying in police custody.

Just how?

It's a question I've asked myself a lot lately, and I think in that location's only one acceptable respond: Notwithstanding I can.

I'g going to more actively look for ways to go involved, rather than hibernate in despair when the news makes me afraid for my children'south futures. I'k going to have my cues from Black activists who know what actions will brand a difference in their own lives. Perhaps most importantly, I'yard going to recommit to listening to and amplifying Blackness voices — and I'one thousand going to try to sit down and stay quiet during my own moments of discomfort, when their stories challenge the things I thought I knew.

I'm particularly interested to relearn American history from the perspective of the people who lived through it. The version I learned in schoolhouse was so sanitized, so paternalistic: White people enslaved Blackness people, only then nosotros saw that it was wrong, and we stopped. We forced Blackness people to live equally second-class citizens in their ain country for some other century, but and then we saw that information technology was wrong, and we stopped.

My wife is originally from Haiti, and several years agone, I learned the history of her country. Information technology's a very different narrative: The French got greedy, enslaving and so many Africans that Blacks outnumbered whites in Haiti by ix-to-one. The enslaved people took reward of their numbers and the machetes they'd been given to work the fields. They rose up, and they killed their masters, and they took their freedom.

It'due south one of the nearly glorious, triumphant events in all of human history. And yet, when I read nigh it for the outset time, my manus instinctively floated up to protect my ain throat.

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This segment aired on June 26, 2020.

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Source: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/06/22/protests-george-floyd-racism-haiti-children-calvin-hennick

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