Let Black Kids Just Be Kids

Thanks for posting this, Isabel. It would be wonderful if we could be color-blind, Kris, and maybe someday the world will be. However, there's still so much systemic and implicit racism that we still have to be conscious of it, understand its roots, acknowledge the pain it's caused, and change our systems to eradicate it. That takes time, and until we get there, we have to call out the differences, because of the consequences, as listed in the last paragraph above:

People of all races see black children as less innocent, more adultlike and more responsible for their actions than their white peers. In turn, normal childhood behavior, like disobedience, tantrums and back talk, is seen as a criminal threat when black kids do it. Social scientists have found that this misperception causes black children to be “pushed out, overpoliced and underprotected,” according to a report by the legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw.

This isn't just an issue in the U.S. -- it's an issue in all countries where one group of people considers another group (of different ethnicity, religion, tribe, sex) less-than. Where a them-us system has been institutionalized.

In the U.S., many whites have said that they're color-blind, and they feel they treat people of all ethnicities equally. But many others are not, as we are seeing in overt events such as Charlottesville. More importantly, by looking carefully at who gets "pushed out, over-policed and under-protected", as well as overlooked, ignored, and disadvantaged, all the evidence points very clearly that our systems and culture certainly are not color-blind.

Racism is an ACE. To eliminate it and its consequences, we have to use the same process as for all ACEs: acknowledge it, talk openly about it, accept responsibility for our contribution to it (and that contribution may be as simple as ignoring it), change what we do individually and make sure our systems create places for people to talk about what happened to them, and then change our systems so that we no longer traumatize already traumatized people and make sure our kids no longer experience it.

When are we going to stop referring to one another's culture as "Black" and "White?" We've managed as a society, to stop referring to other cultures by their color, it's high time we became color blind and started referring to one another by name and species (human). I have never seen a "Black" person and I am certainly not "White." The whole process, in my opinion, sends a culturally derogatory message. Black is always bad and evil in movies and white is almost always "pure and good." We are unknowingly socializing ourselves towards a bias.