One family, built across divide of race and justice
Low
Business
Classified
Shanna Janu did not watch the video. She did not need to hear George Floyd pleading for his life or see the white police officer’s knee on his neck to feel the bleak weight of the moment. She was exhausted.
Her husband, Bill, did watch with his co-workers, and one thought scrolled through his mind like a news ticker: “Oh my God, that is horrible! That is ridiculous.”
Such intramarital dichotomies are not unusual in this American moment, as couples process another unsettled chapter in their nation’s anguished history with race and justice.
But Bill and Shanna Janu straddle the issues of the day to a degree few of their friends could imagine. He is a white sergeant in the Baltimore Police Department. She is a Black attorney at the Centers
TODAY’S WEATHER
for Medicare & Medicaid Services. They’re raising two children — 4-year-old Wesley and 1-year-old Cordelia — in a city and country laced with dangers for young Black people.
With shared curiosity and respect for each other’s open minds, they’ve built a loving relationship across divides that seem unbridgeable to many Americans.
She’s taught him about institutional racism and housing discrimination. He’s walked her through an officer’s mental checklist when deciding whether to use force. They both fret about the world their children will enter.
The other day, 46-year-old Bill watched his effervescent boy sitting on a neighbor’s doorstep. Instead of enjoying the moment, he thought about the reaction some people might have to an older Black youth in the same scenario.
“Suddenly, he might be seen as a threat,” he said. “At 4 years old, I’m trying to instill in my child that because he’s Black, more than if he was white, don’t sit on other people’s doorsteps.”
He thinks about Tamir Rice, the 12-yearold boy shot dead by a Cleveland police officer because he was carrying a replica toy gun. “That’s an incident that could easily happen, and it scares the hell out of me,” he said.
Beyond mortal dangers, Wesley and Cordelia will face questions about their racial identities. Wesley has already begun considering what color he is.
He recently asked: “Daddy’s a police officer and he’s white, so does that mean he’s mean to us?”
“So we had to go through all that,” 35-year-old Shanna said. “And explain that no, of course he’s not mean to us, but a lot of white people are mean to Black people.”
She worries less than she might about her son’s future encounters with police, partly because he’s the son of a cop. “Also, honestly, he’s very light-skinned, so he’s not going to be as much of a target,” she said.
She doesn’t like living in a world where lighter skin is a shield. “It’s really sad,” she said. “But it gives us a certain amount of privilege. And yes, I think about these things.”
This is not the first time the Janus have opened their lives to public consumption. In 2016, a few months after Wesley was born at St. Agnes Hospital and a year after their city was torn asunder by the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered in police custody, they sat for an interview with The New York Times.
“Am I being a disloyal law enforcement wife because I do feel so strongly for Black Lives Matter, because I do feel such a strong affinity for the movement?” Shanna wondered in that profile.
Much has happened in the four years since. The Janus watched as their country elected Donald Trump president, as white nationalists crowded the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, as heightened waves of violent crime ripped away at Baltimore. Into this landscape they greeted their daughter, born in April 2019. Now, she’s taking her first steps, and they’re living with the same issues, reignited by the deaths of Floyd and other Black citizens such as Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks.
Bill has worked at the protests that have swept Baltimore in recent weeks. Shanna has acted as a sounding board and educator for friends, many of them white, who are trying to understand and say the right things.
“I just feel a lot of mental exhaustion over the constant killing of Black people, not just by police but by almost anyone,” she said. “And I don’t know how hopeful I am. When we did that story, Obama was president. Now, with Trump in office, it seems like a lot of really awful people have felt licensed to be loud and awful.”
She posts informative material on social media and tries to remain open to any conversation. But even the words of wellmeaning people sometimes leave a bitter taste.
“I’m also exhausted at the people who are just realizing it’s a problem,” she said. “Like, I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re upset about it. But it’s just exhausting and annoying that you guys didn’t realize this was a problem before.”
Bill has felt his wife’s emotional fatigue and shares it. The Cleveland native loves his adopted home — the convenience of meeting friends for a beer in the couple’s South Baltimore neighborhood or walking Wesley to the Maryland Science Center. But since the unrest after Gray’s death, he’s felt the city’s invisible walls closing in on him. Normally, he uses his military experience (four years in the U.S. Air Force and six in the Army) to teach tactical medical care in the police department’s education and training section. But at recent protests, he stood for hours, absorbing angry words from people who saw him as a faceless cog in a brutal institution. He understands the rage. Nonetheless, it wears at him.
As do the questions from friends and acquaintances who want him to speak on behalf of all police officers. “Can’t we bring sports back?” he thought recently. “So people can just make fun of me for the Cleveland Browns.”
So he and Shanna talk about leaving their red brick rowhouse for someplace where their kids would have a yard.
When Shanna feels optimistic, it’s partly because of the reactions from people who hear her story.
Friends see the couple as a small beacon of hope.
“My husband and I brought it up the other day, how interesting their dynamic is at this time in the world,” said Shanna’s closest friend, Lindsay Daniel, who introduced her to Bill. “There’s just so many layers to what’s going on and to the two of them. … They both have a lot of passion, and they both stand up for what they believe in. They’re very educated. But at the same time, they realize they have to be laid back about certain things to survive.”
More recently, Shanna has felt heartened by the number of people reaching out for some understanding of the anger and pain she feels. “They want to talk about antiracism and understand what white privilege and white fragility mean,” she said. “I’ve never heard so many white people say the words systemic racism.”
She laughed. Shanna speaks bluntly on difficult issues but maintains her biting sense of humor. On Instagram, she refers to herself as: “Experienced mom to 4-legged fur babies. Amateur mom to 2-legged not so furry kids. Average wife.”
When she and Bill met for the first time at a Light Street bar, they bonded over their mutual love of the quippy television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Both of their children are named after characters from the Buffyverse.
The couple married in July 2014, less than a month before Michael Brown Jr. was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
In those early days, Bill and Shanna often went at it in spirited debates, he from the viewpoint of a veteran police officer, she from the viewpoint of a social-justice crusader who’d grown up on her parents’ stories of being mistreated in the Jim Crow South.
Now, neither can discuss current events without referencing the other’s point of view. Bill feels the Baltimore Police Department has made terrific progress over the past five years. He said he doesn’t know a single officer who would condone what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. But his wife’s voice lives in his head, reminding him that there’s always more work to be done.
“There’s a lot less, not so much arguing, but a lot less back and forth,” Shanna said. “He was always willing to listen, but now, I have to explain a lot less.”
They sound almost identical discussing the growing debate over defunding police departments. Though Bill doesn’t like the term, which veers too closely toward “disbanding” for his taste, he sees real value in shifting responsibilities, especially those involving mental health, from police to other agencies.
“Should police be responding to behavioral crises?” he asked, referencing a recent police-involved shooting in the city. “Why are we responding to suicidal people or overdoses when there should be people with much better expertise?”
“We started talking about this very early on in our relationship,” Shanna said. “The police do too much. We’ve had so many budget cuts for different social agencies since the ’80s, and police were just supposed to step in and do all these things. It’s just putting everyone in a bad position.”
Not that they always agree. The recent death of Rayshard Brooks, who was shot twice in the back by an Atlanta police officer after an encounter at a Wendy’s drive-thru lane, invited a collision of perspectives.
“To me, morally, there’s a problem with that case,” Shanna said. “He was running away and he was shot in the back.”
Bill pointed out that Brooks had aimed a taser with 25-foot range at the pursuing officer and that if the taser had struck, he could have taken the officer’s gun. Without knowing all the details, he did not endorse the Atlanta officer’s use of deadly force. But he did not see it as a cut-and-dried issue.
“The optics are awful,” he said, pausing for a long sigh. “That situation went from zero to a hundred in a split second, and then to have an officer just turn it off in less than a second, when he thinks somebody might be trying to kill him, it’s just a difficult thing.”
Shanna listened to her husband, interjecting with questions about conflicting details as she played with Cordelia.
“It’s hard to understand what is what,” she said.