Listen to the way blacks must discuss race

I’m 4 years old and at morning’s first light, I hear a tapping on the bedroom window. I peek through the blinds and see a man wearing a white cowboy hat, a badge on his blue long sleeve shirt and a gun in a holster around his light tan slacks.

It’s my father, and it’s part of our morning ritual. He worked the overnight shift as a Bexar County sheriff ’s deputy and for some reason he didn’t have a house key. Not wanting to wake my grandmother and uncle, his tapping on the window was the signal for me to wake my mother to open the door.

My father loved law enforcement. His career included being the first black investigator in the Sheriff ’s Office and a Drug Enforcement Agency agent.

The first anger I saw in my father was when I told him a policeman stopped me as I walked to high school one morning and asked if he could look inside my brown lunch bag because there had been a robbery on New Braunfels Avenue. I told him no. Fortunately, he didn’t press the issue.

My father was torn between pride that I’d stood up for my rights, anger at the officer for stopping me and fear that my refusal could have endangered my life. So he had “the talk” with me that black parents must have with their children about interacting with police.

White parents may have “a talk” with their children about being cooperative with the police, but for black parents “the talk” is a life-and-death plea, because cooperation isn’t always enough and the wrong, misunderstood move or a wallet mistaken for a gun could lead to injury or death.

Among the inequities in the United States is that of discourse on race, with the parameters of discussion set by the majority who assume that experiences not shared by them involving race are imagined or exaggerated.

But conversations like “the talk” isn’t a rite of passage for white families.

Neither are conversations about the first time being called the “n-word.” Or explaining that word to a child.

In the days following the 1992 acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, which was caught on tape, I’d break into tears during the day. One morning while working out at the Barbara Jordan Center, I told that to Bill Blair, the center’s executive director.

Bill, a 6-foot-6 Air Force veteran and basketball star at Providence who played with the Boston Celtics, said, “Man, the same thing’s happening to me. I’ll be driving, think about Rodney and start bawling.”

We talked about why we were hurting, about race and our diminishing faith in our country to do right. That was a conversation being held by black men and women around the country, but I doubt if it was a staple of discussion among white people.

It is the substance of those conversations, of pain more often swallowed than spoken, that blacks have tried to share with whites. Not for pity, but in the hope that from this knowledge will spring acceptance of responsibility.

Listening and acting on what you’ve heard can be profound, even redemptive, when it corrects an errant course. But you must hear and not assume.

“Black Lives Matter” is divisive if you want it to be. Responding with “All Lives Matter” misses the point. It’s as if this were 1862 and an organization of runaway black slaves calling themselves “Black Emancipation Matters” provoked people into saying “You black slaves are racist! All Emancipation Matters!” Yeah, but the black slaves aren’t emancipated.

There is a heavy weariness, generation after generation, from trying to explain a problem to people who can help alleviate it. To not be heard and to repeat it again and again is like pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it, repeatedly, roll back on you.

The crushing weight of George Floyd’s death on this nation is the accumulated weight of generations of these boulders.

But something extraordinary is happening. Seeing Floyd’s pleas ignored on video has made this nation seem to want to listen to the living, for now, at least.

The hands lifting those boulders and rolling them, coast to coast, across America aren’t just black but white, brown, red and yellow. I can’t help but feel the widening, peaceful protests lifting me out of despair and rekindling embers of hope.

I don’t want to be disappointed by the protests stopping with nothing to show but sore feet and scattered boulders.

Out in the streets they’re singing the aspirational “We Shall Overcome” as they did at the March on Washington in 1963. I want us to finally get beyond the overcoming and to celebrate with another song from that day,

“How I Got Over.”

I want George Floyd to be the reason we finally got over, and I want Mahalia Jackson holding George as she sings.

People gather at the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington to protest police brutality and George Floyd’s death. The crushing weight of his death on this nation is the accumulation of all that has been said but not heard. Yet the peaceful protests say hope is not lost.

Courtesy photo My father was torn between pride I’d stood up for my rights, anger at the officer and fear for my life.