Racial Profiling: Children Reflect Their Parents
The Time To Impart Lessons on Authority These are not new lessons taught to black children sitting at the dinner table. They are old lessons, repeated in an oral tradition for survival. Told by grandmothers with wrinkled hands, grandfathers who saw something way back when, worried mothers talking in hypotheticals. They are lessons you don't want to teach a child because it could make him feel vulnerable, crack her innocence, pop this generation's colorblind bubble. So you wait until it's absolutely necessary and relevant, and explain it like this: If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite. Say: 'Yes, sir. No, sir.' Make no sudden movements. Do not try to run. Why? they ask. And that's when you tell them: You are a black child in America. There is a history here. So, baby, just be careful. 'I tell them if a police officer comes up to you, all you have to say is, 'Okay, officer. Yes, sir. Thank you.' Then move on. Don't say nothing smart,...