Why Ferguson outcome should haunt every parent

[marmar]

from the Detroit Free Press:


By Stephen Henderson, Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor


The smolder of injustice sparks to flame again in Ferguson, Mo.

It's happened before. It will happen again. And until we quell the still-burning fires of America's racial strife, we'll live with the smoke and ashes.

Every parent of a child of color lives, every day, in fear that a hoodie, a certain gait or an offhand remark might inspire authorities to see menace, and to strike with lethal force. I can't begin to know how to explain that to my son, now 11 and brown-skinned and beginning to look like some of the older kids I see in news reports like those from Ferguson.

Every parent in the nation should live with unease over the sustained and wretched dehumanization that assigns expendability to some children. Can we respect each other, let alone live together, if it's OK to kill some of our kids?

........(snip)........

The fear sweeping black families across the country is not about their children's innocence or guilt, but about the brutality with which authority is exercised, and the insistence that it's always justified. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-henderson/2014/11/26/ferguson-michael-brown-race/70122128/

[gwheezie]

1. When my husband was dying he wanted to my grandson a knife

My grandson is a scout and got his whittling badge. My husband was a scout and his dad gave him the knife. My grandson always wanted to hold that knife he like the handle and feel of it.
My grandson is 10 and black. He's a big kid but looks like a child. Thinks and plays like a child. He loves science and the natural world and goes in the woods looking at animal foot prints and birds and wasp nests in tree. He takes samples. Takes pictures. He likes to have the knife on his belt. We're afraid to let him carry the knife because he's a tall black boy. Taller than his grandma. To me he looks like a boy but many have already taken him to be 14. So he knows he can't carry it to school but his dad said he can't carry it out exploring in the woods with friends. He can only take it to scouts.
That's our fear that my sweet smart grandson who talks to everyone and loves to explore the woods in the dark ever since I got him night vision goggles with his grandpas whittling knife could get him in trouble.

[YarnAddict]

2. He sounds like a great kid

As a white woman, I can't imagine how I would deal with the very real fears that you must have for him. So sorry that you have to go through this.

[gwheezie]

4. I'm white. I didn't know.

intellectually I thought I knew. But I didn't feel it in my gut and heart until he was born. Perhaps if all white people had a black grandchild they would feel enough to be devastated and heart broken when a12 year old with a fake gun is killed. Whenever this happens the image oft grandson fills my vision. When people say these boys did something they deserved to die they are talking about my grandson

[HereSince1628]

3. Justice isn't just an outcome of a legal process. It is a sense of satisfaction

that wrongs have been accounted for, and/or that future wrongs have been prevented.

It's important to understand that excusing outcomes of individual cases as occasional "unhappy outcomes of the legal process" is merely enabling apologetics and rhetorical camouflage for yet more SNAFU.

There is an exceedingly dissatisfying pattern emerging from the legal systems treatment of entire classes of American society.