Reverie Koniecki
His Innocence
I have obsessed over all the ways my son could die since he was born. I didn't sleep his first year because I was so busy listening to his breaths. If he lingered too long between inhale and exhale, I would rush to his crib. He was so accident-prone as a baby I was surprised when he made it to his first year. Then there was choking. At any given moment, I was prepared to administer the Heimlich. A lingering cough has prompted me to pull over to the side of the road, snatch him out of his carseat and hold him upside down while I pounded on his back. I am pretty certain he didn't need it, but you can never be too sure. Fortunately, he doesn't remember any of this. In grade school it was accidents. I nearly lost my mind the time he busted his head open on a trampoline. I spent the entire car ride to the hospital repeating, It's gonna be okay, It's gonna be okay, while he retched in a trash can. If a corner had been available, I would have rocked myself back and forth in it. By the time we got to the hospital, the nurses and doctors were more worried about me than they were him. When he got to middle school, I started to worry about the police. We know how the story starts. Black boy in a hoodie walks into a neighborhood. ...
My younger brother had his first interaction with the law in middle school. I was twenty and felt grown, but was very much still an adolescent. My boyfriend and I had the brilliant idea to steal gas from the gas station at the bottom of my street. The owner got my license plate number and called the police. My family lived on the grounds of a gated state veterans hospital where the only way in was guarded by state police. The town police contacted the front guards who called my mother (because the car was in her name) and accused my fourteen-year-old brother of stealing the gas. He was guilty before presumed innocent. This kid still had some of his baby teeth and rode his bike outside, yet he was perceived as being not only old enough to drive, but savvy enough (or foolish enough) to drive down the street and zoom off without paying. That plan would never have crossed my brother's mind at that age. The entire day he had been sitting next to my mother playing video games.
The Essence of Innocence, a study published by the American Psychological Association in 2014, concluded that Black boys are seen as 4.5 years older than white boys of the same age. With that assumption comes the consequence of Black boys being seen as less innocent than white boys, that they are assigned a higher degree of responsibility for their actions, are more likely to be perceived as threatening. A thirteen-year-old child could be perceived as an adult. Children aren't threatening by nature. They are seen as innocent. However Black boys aren't afforded the rights of childhood because they are more likely to be mistaken as older and seen as guilty.
Most of my interactions with the law have been when I needed them. But I still fear them, especially when it comes to my son. It is anxiety inducing to turn on the news and be able to insert your kid's face into the Black hoodie lying on the sidewalk. It took me a year to watch the Sandra Bland video. I just didn't have the courage. I stopped watching the news after Trayvon because I couldn't stand to listen to him die over and over again. I waited five years to watch Fruitvale Station, and, when I did, I sobbed. Philando's video gave me nightmares. The McKinney swimming pool incident ignited my rage. My beautiful boy could just as easily find himself on the wrong side of a bullet. Or break his neck. Or suffocate. Or be slammed down on the ground, be thrown into a cell and forgotten. It doesn't matter if you live in a gated community or whether you moved to a Black suburb to keep your kids safe. It doesn't matter if you paid your registration fees and have your insurance papers. It doesn't matter if you have a good job or good credit. It doesn't matter if you're educated. It doesn't matter if you have good hair. It doesn't matter if you speak well or are polite.
When I realized that they would be driving in a few years, I started training my kids on how to interact with the police should they get pulled over, or even stopped on the street, because the older they got, the further they ventured away from me. I'd tell them, You know I'm not down for that yessir, yes ma'am bullshit, but they are here in the South, so make sure you use it. Do what they tell you to do. Don't argue even if you are right. We can have a protest later, but I need you to come home. I wrestled with whether or not I needed to be so direct. At one point, I drilled my point so hard that I made my son cry. But the fear that he would have an encounter while away from me overrode my inclination to back off. It was better that he feared my words than be put in a situation where he needed to be afraid.
The Essence of Innocence explores the idea of innocence as one of the central protections afforded to children. When Black children are dehumanized, it reduces their protection from harsh, adult treatment. In effect, Black children do not receive the same privileges of innocence as white children. Dehumanization involves the denial of full humanness of others and a loss of social consideration. This loss undermines the defining characteristics of childhood—innocence and the need for protection. This may cause Black children to be seen as older than they are, setting a context for harsh treatment and violence. All of the factors that I use as a shield—living in a Black suburb, training my kids to respect authority, are ineffective against how my children are perceived.
I have seen two police officers wrestle an eighth-grader to the ground. I have no idea what the charge was, but the kid was a fighter. They maced him, but couldn't get a good enough grip on his hands to handcuff him. They tased him three times before they finally gained control of the situation. The kid graduated from being a kid to being a situation. In the classroom, teachers are trained to give equity to students. This means that learning may look different for everyone based on their needs because children can't always rise on their own. However, there is no differentiation in the justice system.
The authors of The Essence of Innocence explain that dehumanization differs from prejudice in that prejudice is broad and may result in a job applicant being undervalued, versus dehumanization, which leads to moral exclusion and could escalate to extreme violence. Groups who are dehumanized are morally excluded, allowing people to treat the other in a way that would be morally reprehensible in another context. The United States has a long history of the moral exclusion of Black children. In slavery times, it was permissable for children to be separated from their parents at any age. In 1944, fourteen-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. became the youngest person in the U.S. to be legally executed. In 1955 Emmett Till was dragged from his bed, beaten to the point where he was unrecognizable, and lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. And let's not forget eleven-year-old Tamir Rice's toy gun.
My son called me at work that day. "Mom," he said and then waited for me to reply. I was in a classroom full of seventh-graders and it was the end of the day. I could hardly hear him over the noise of the kids and the PA system calling out each individual student name for dismissal. The red floor reflected the fluorescent lights in my windowless classroom. The mound of papers on my desk closed in on me. The end of the day couldn't come quick enough. "Yes?" I said, worried. I am always worried when they call me at work.
"Mom. I was walking home and these kids, these sixth-graders broke into someone's house."
My first thought was to get in my car and race to the house. But even if I found coverage for my class and hauled ass down the freeway, it would still take me thirty minutes to get there. I told him to call the police because that's what a good citizen does when there's trouble. I called them too and explained what had happened and that I was at work and couldn't get there for another thirty minutes. An officer called me back and asked if my son would answer the door. I told him that if he saw their uniforms, he would. Twenty minutes later, I got a call from the officer who responded to the call. They'd gone to the house and talked to my son and then to the house that got broken into. The burglars didn't take anything. They just broke a window and went inside. The police officer assured me that they know the kids who had broken into the house and would talk to the parents. I headed home with the feeling that I had done my civic duty.
Accidents can be deadly. The police officer didn't tell me that they mixed up the addresses when they got our calls. They didn't tell me that when they arrived at my house, the back gate was open, and the back door unlocked. They didn't tell me that they entered. Or that their guns were drawn. Two years after my son's run-in with the police, twenty minutes away from us, Botham Jean would be killed sitting in his own living room because of a mix up. I am grateful for the outcome, but I can't help but to think what would have happened if my son had been seen as threatening. What if he'd changed out of his school uniform? What if he'd hit his growth spurt? Would he be seen as innocent?
Reverie Koniecki is an African American writer and educator living in Dallas, Texas. She earned her MFA in Poetry and Nonfiction from New England College. Her poems and prose have appeared in HerStry, Multiplicity, HeavyFeather Review, and forthcoming Post Road.
@KonieckiReverie
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