What Ferguson Means for Black Women

Photo: Lesley McSpadden (Getty)On Monday, along with most of America, I waited to hear what the grand jury in Ferguson would decide. But I knew what it would be. I have been down this road before. My breath bated, my chest tight with anxiety, I still hoped that somehow one of us might get justice. That one of our lives would matter before the courts of the country that we labored to build.
When the decision came down that they declined to indict, I was buying Christmas tricycles for my twin nephews. They are two. They are happy babies and they remind me so much of their father and myself when we were children. And I cannot wait to be there for every first, every trial, every error; I cannot wait to watch them grow from boys to men. And what should be one of the greatest joys of my life brings me one of the biggest pains of my life: One day, their mother, my mother and myself will have to tell them about police brutality in this country, how and why they are targets, and of their unique place in this American horror story.
It is left up to us because their father (my brother), Clinton Roebexar Allen, was shot seven times and killed by a Dallas police officer, Clark Staller. As with Wilson, a grand jury declined to indict Staller, despite five eyewitnesses’ testimony, despite Clinton being shot in the back and under his arm while his hands were up, despite mishandling of evidence, despite all of these things. This is not standard procedure, state or federal, for a jury to decline to indict. In fact, in 2010, of the 162,000 federal cases that were prosecuted, only 11 juries issued a “no-bill.”
Photo: A protestor arrested at the 1964 Rochester race riots.
Only four percent of police-involved shootings are even reported to the FBI’s database. And even in these instances, which are self-reported by law enforcement and therefore probably do not even represent the full extent of the problem, reports show that over a seven-year period ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week. Take Dallas, for example, where my brother was killed. When my mother’s organization, Mothers Against Police Brutality, and others in Dallas started pulling data and public records requests from the police department, we found that in 40 years since the last officer was indicted in Dallas (for shooting a 12-year-old Latino boy in the back of the head), close to 180 black and brown people had been killed at the hands of the police. In other words, we should not expect justice. And it is these facts and this history that black women have to face when rearing our boys. They can be killed, at any time and we are not to expect justice. Not even a trial.
When these men are killed, it is left to us women to pick up the pieces. To hold our families together. To be mother and father, aunt and nephew, brother and sister to the children that are left behind.
And we are tired.
We are tired of hearing the rhetoric that these men are killed because they come from broken homes. Clinton’s father was present in his life. Michael Brown’s father was present in his life. Trayvon Martin’s father was present in his life. Half of American marriages end in divorce; if our homes are broken, that means your homes are probably broken too. Black men are routinely given harsher and longer prison sentences than white men. These absences leave not just a psychological and emotional impact, but a financial one as well. Few families in America are able to make it on one salary, but that is what black families are expected to do when their co-breadwinners are taken.
Photo: Medgar Evers’ funeral
We are tired of having to teach them: “If you are stopped by the police, put your hands on the wheel. Do not unexpectedly reach for anything. Speak calmly. Please come home in one piece.” I do not know a black man that has not been given this talk, because being black is enough to put their lives in danger. My uncle, a respected professor and anesthesiologist, drives a Lexus. He is routinely stopped by white cops who consider all those things to be “suspicious.” This is supposed to only happen to black men when their pants are sagging and they listen to rap music.
What are we to do? What do we do when there is an implicit racial bias against people of color that police forces in this country refuse to address and change in their officers? What do we do when the police shoot our 12-year-old babies because they think they are armed, 20-year-old men? For the people that say that we should not protest, we say, it is the only choice that we have left. We cannot call the police, we cannot go to court and get justice, so we are in the streets, protesting. The value of black lives has been totally denied through the “respectable” and “civil” conduits that white people have the privilege to trust, rely on and believe in.
Photo: A woman protests in Ferguson.
Women carry the weight and responsibility of these families being dismantled. In this renewed engagement of feminism, those who stand and identify with feminism must support this too. I am a woman and my right to live freely with my family intact has been violated. I and so many other women are left with a challenging task. We, the survivors, are left to rear these beautiful boys into fearless and brave men, but our country is asking us to teach them to be diminished and fearful in the face of the police because they might be killed.
A black mother told me last night, “I want a white mother to know what I feel. I want her to sit up like me, and wonder when her child doesn’t come home, if he’s been shot by the police. I want her to feel the terror of knowing that the love of your life, your child, can be taken from you because of the color of their skin.” We want our boys to have a chance.
Ferguson is a wake up call. Black mothers are being told to prepare their sons for second class citizenship. We cannot do that. We cannot go quietly into the night on this one. And we need other mothers, other women that love their families and have the privilege to know that their sons, if stopped by the police, will make it home, to stand with us. Because we have been left no choice but to stand.