Smacks of good sense
Baltimore mother Toya Graham delivers a slap that’s heard around the nation.
Toya Graham didn’t just smack some sense into her son as he headed out to participate in the Baltimore rioting Monday; she smacked some sense into the rest of us too.
In a brief and jumpy video that quickly began circulating on social media, Graham is seen grabbing her son, who is dressed in black sweatpants, hoodie and mask. Slapping the sides of his hooded head while loudly dressing him down for thinking he would join in “this nonsense,” Graham moves him away from the police line, presumably toward their home, directing him to “come here and take that [expletive] off ” and hitting him again when he does not appear to be listening.
With her bright yellow top and diminutive stature, Graham swoops and drives like an angry bird, an Easter chick gone wild. The son, to his credit, doesn’t put up much of a fight, and none of the blows appear to cause pain so much as keep him moving away from the police lines. He’s at least a foot taller than she, which lends humor to the image, like those old silent movies in which a tiny woman chases off a marauder with a broom.
But in the video’s final moments, the son’s mask slips and it’s no longer funny: He’s just a kid.
A big, tall kid, 16 years old, who was about to make a big, possibly irrevocable, mis-
take.
Suddenly, Graham’s antic fury and profanity didn’t seem so outrageous. Suddenly, she was Every Mom, shocked to see her child about to become a masked rioter, and calling on her last reserve to keep him from doing something of which no good could come, something that might prove fatal.
Suddenly too she was every outraged citizen of Baltimore, and the country, who watched mobs burn already beleaguered neighborhoods and wondered, “What is wrong with you?”
More than that, though, she was a reminder, a huge and crucial reminder, that those mobs are not made of up of thugs; they’re made up of people.
Some in each group may be criminal, others weakwilled, and all should be held responsible for their actions. But when we start thinking of any group in terms other than the distinct humanity of its members, we just make things worse.
Indeed, on Monday, many were calling out CNN reporters for characterizing the poor parts of Baltimore as being “like another world,” as if urban poverty were, literally, an alien concept. Later that day, other outlets quoted people saying they had never seen people behave this way.
Which is simply absurd. No matter how revitalized their centers, all major cities have poor and/or troubled neighborhoods, and most cities have experienced rioting over the years.
But the “we are one” mantra goes out the window when human behavior veers toward the unfortunate, and we all seek solace in distance. What is wrong with “those” people, we wonder watching the fires light up the night sky. Don’t they realize they’re just hurting themselves?
Then along came Graham, to remind us that for every figure on the wrong side of the riot gear, there was a parent, a person and a story.
She became an instant national heroine and just in time for Mother’s Day. Twitter went all #momoftheyear. Baltimore’s mayor said she wished more moms were out on the lines Tuesday night. Headlines called for an army of like-minded moms.
CBS snagged the first interviews, first for the nightly news and then for the morning, and in both Graham was clear in her reasoning and unapologetic. She did not want her son to become another Freddie Gray; nor did she want him to become a rockand bottle-throwing vandal.
In her Wednesday interview on “CBS This Morning,” she said she understood the anger fueling the crowd.
“We can’t talk to the cops,” she said, in answer to a question about the community’s relationship with the police force. She would have been fine, she said, with her son going to Gray’s funeral or engaging in protest, but that is not what he was preparing to do.
When she saw him with a rock in his hand, she “just lost it.”
And found a connection with millions of Americans, especially parents.
“I am a zero-tolerant mother,” she told CBS in a widely reported first interview. “He knew that. He knew he was in trouble.”
The world in a maternal smack-down. Some wrung their hands at Graham’s repeated slaps — zero tolerance can certainly apply to corporal punishment too, and striking a child, even a tall 16 year old, is not any thinking person’s parenting ideal. Graham acknowledged that she had lost control and wondered, in Wednesday’s interview, what her pastor would think of her.
But for many others, it was impossible not to empathize — if the choice came down to delivering a couple of slaps to a hoodied head or allowing your child to wind up in jail or a victim and/or perpetrator of potential mass violence, which would you choose?
Many parents know the horror of discovering that their child is engaging in dangerous behavior. For some, it might be driving while drunk, or being sexually irresponsible, stealing or cheating and then lying when asked.
For Graham, a single mother of color raising her children in a city plagued by crime and an oftentimes hostile police force, it was seeing her son’s righteous frustration give way to self-destructive vengeance in a moment already blazing with bad onthe-spot decisions.
Her only thought, she says, was to get her kid back in the house as quickly as possible, before something happened that she could not fix.
In one of the climactic scenes of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” an oblivious Scout Finch steps into a group of white men planning to break Tom Robinson out of jail and lynch him. Even if it means harming her father, Atticus, an attorney who is standing guard.
“Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” she says, recognizing one of the men and speaking to him about his son, who is her schoolmate.
As the moment hangs in fatal balance, Mr. Cunningham finally stoops to answer her and then calls the men off.
A mob, Atticus tells Scout later, is always made up of people, and Scout reminded those men of their basic humanity.
Now, Toya Graham and her son have done us the very same favor.