New York/Los Angeles - Raising black boys
in America involves "constant mental anguish," Danielle
Pattillo, a special education teacher in New York City and
mother to two sons, ages 14 and 22, said.
Every day Pattillo told her sons they were unique, wanted,
valued, and loved - "each step in their life, each plateau of
their life."
But she also prepared them.
"I let them know that the world does not love them,"
Pattillo said. "And just because they don't love you doesn't
mean you're not great. And it doesn't mean that you're not
important. And it doesn't mean that you don't exist."
The death of George Floyd, a 46-year old black man who died
in May after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his
neck for nearly nine minutes, has triggered widespread protests
in the United States and around the world against police
brutality and racism.
It has also been a painful reminder to black mothers in the
U.S. how vulnerable their children, and especially their sons,
are to police brutality, at least five women Reuters interviewed
said.
Police-involved fatalities in the United States average
nearly three deaths per day, a 2018 study https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-race-police-deaths/police-involved-deaths-vary-by-race-and-place-idUSKBN1KL2M4
in the American Journal of Public Health showed, and black men
are more than twice as likely to be killed during them than
white men.
One in every 1,000 black men in the United States will be
killed by a police officer, vs. one in every 2,000 men overall,
a 2019 study https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793 by the
National Academy of Sciences found.
Floyd's death follows a string of other high profile deaths
of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police, including
the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio in 2014, the
choking death of Eric Garner in New York City in 2014, and the
March shooting of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky during a "no knock"
arrest that targeted the wrong house.
On June 12, Rayshard Brooks, a black man, was fatally shot
in the back by police in Atlanta, after being found asleep in a
parking lot.
DREADING 'THE TALK' FOR YEARS
Pattillo said she sobbed the first time she sat down her
younger son, then 12 years old, to have what's known in the
black community as "The Talk" - about how to behave when you are
inevitably stopped by police, so you don't become another
statistic.
Speak slowly, keep your school I.D. on you, but don't put
your hand in your pocket to reach for it without asking. Don't
give the officer anything that could be considered sass.
"These are not conversations that you should be having with
your children who are 12," she said.
The Talk is so ubiquitous that the National Black Police
Association (NBPA) holds a dramatized version with police
officers, judges and prosecutors in high schools, and
distributes a written guide https://542b2294-673b-4866-8ef1-b8424d1a03f3.filesusr.com/ugd/c725f7_2a8e3072c4d14e59a05272a8c370ed05.pdf
entitled "What to Do When Stopped by the Police."
"We show how quickly it can go bad," explained Regina
Holman, a retired police officer in Las Vegas, president of the
NBPA in Nevada, and mother and grandmother. Officers teach
students "they have a very good chance that their cars are going
to be ransacked, and they're not going to be treated right."
"When they become non-compliant, that’s when things go
wrong," Holman said. "We teach them you cannot fight your
battles at that moment."
Neakai Lewis, an event producer in Los Angeles, lives in
upscale neighborhood View Park nicknamed "The Black Beverly
Hills," that has been home to entertainers Ray Charles and Tina
Turner. Lewis created "The Mom Group," for black women in Los
Angeles to address additional stresses they face as parents.
Even though her son is only 21 months old, she's already
planning The Talk.
"It’s years of just drilling it in that everybody is
beautiful, everybody deserves respect but you have a certain
tone to your skin that for some reason is going to make you a
threat - so here are the things that you're going to need to do
to survive and this is real," said Lewis.
"It's my duty as his mom to prepare him."
Chantal Bonitto, 38, is raising a five-year-old son, and
gave birth to a second baby boy with her white husband in New
York earlier this month. Race has always been a part of family
conversations, and she's already guiding her son's behavior due
to fear of racial biases.
"He can't be the wild kid. He wants to be the class clown.
You cannot be the class clown," she said. "I fear the day when
he turns 10, and that admiration for this cute little
curly-haired boy turns into fear," she said.
Bonitto said she's trying to instill the same confidence in
her son her parents instilled in her as a black girl growing up
in Brooklyn. "Most of all, that if someone does discriminate
against him or makes him feel like he is 'lesser than,' in his
heart he knows that's not true."
Bonitto's father was a corrections officer, she said. "I
know and respect that his job paid for my college tuition, it
provided me with healthcare and benefits, but the compromise was
that he saw a flawed criminal justice system that locked up men
that looked like him."
Bonitto said she wants her son to be "wary of all authority
figures who wear a badge and a gun."
"I don’t deny that there are good cops," Lewis said. But,
she added, "How can you respect or how can you look up to
somebody that you constantly have to fear?"
POLICE GRAPPLE WITH THEIR ROLE
Floyd's death has prompted an unprecedented national
conversation about the role of police in America, and their
treatment of African Americans. On June 15, New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo signed a police reform bill, flanked by mothers who
has lost their black sons to police violence.
Some black mothers who made their careers in law enforcement
find they're struggling for answers. "My grandson is 17," said
Holman, who served on the Las Vegas police force for over 27
years. "He said to me, 'You taught me to respect the police. You
always told me to comply. But look at George Floyd. He respected
the police, and now he’s dead. What do I do now?'"
The fear that black boys and their parents are feeling "is
something that is hard to fight," said Zsakhiem James, a police
captain in Camden, New Jersey, a city that has reformed law enforcement in recent years to focus on de-escalation and
community policing.
"Especially in light of the George Floyd incident," James
said. "It's not just a fear of the Camden County Police. It's a
fear of all police."
'WE CAN'T DO IT ALONE'
Black women in the United States are under a unique set of
stresses, said Lori Hoggard, associate professor of psychology
and director of the Racism, Identity, Coping, and Health Lab at
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
The stress they experience contributes to the
disproportionately high levels of depression and cardiovascular
disease, among other health problems, Hoggard said.
Pattillo and other mothers say they feel pressure to fix the
impacts of systemic racism on the men in her life, and
especially their sons.
"Black women have been tasked with having to be trauma
surgeons for situations that we are not trained for... This is
not something that only the black community can do, because the
black community didn't put the black community in this
predicament. So we can't do it alone."