As a Young Black Person in America: Who Do I Get To Be When I Grow Up?
What do you want to be when you grow up? This is the famous question that every little kid is asked at least once during their childhood.
When I was 10, I wanted to be a culinary artist because I loved designing art and baking with my mom. When I was 12, I wanted to be a humanitarian/philanthropist having enough influence and money to save the world one day. When I was 14, I wanted to be a neurologist so that I could help kids heal from brain injury the same way doctors had helped me when I had multiple concussions due to sports. When I was 16, I wanted to be a lawyer because I wanted to help people in the same way that my sister was on track to do. So many people, places, and experiences shaped how I understood myself and what my role in society would look like. Although my ideas seemed to shape-shift overtime, I never lacked ambition or vision for a long life where I decided who I got to be.
I am now 21, I have earned a bachelor’s degree, I have traveled around the world and back, I have received prestigious scholarships, and I have held a variety of jobs and all I want to do is be freely Black without having my life threatened at the hands of *racists, police officers, and a fundamentally defective criminal justice system.
You see, for Black people, survival becomes an added job that we have permanently and unknowingly signed up for at birth, resting solely on the basis of our complexion. The first role that we ever have is as a flawed, dangerous, or threatening figure to society.
I remember the first day that I learned this. I was 8 years old. I was one of the very few Black students at my predominately White school prep school but I enjoyed attending school there because I was learning so much, playing a lot, and genuinely felt loved and cared for. Most days, I attended the aftercare program where I remember always having the time of my life laughing and screaming on the playground, creating cute arts and crafts, and hugging and bonding with my friends until my parents picked me up. All was well, until one of my White friends came up to me and told me that one of the White after-school teachers told her that I was “not a good girl” and further explained that she should know that by now. My friend expressed sadness because now she didn’t know whether or not she could play with me anymore. I never knew the context of that conversation, or why I was picked as the bad girl, I only know that it happened and it always stayed in the back of my mind.
In the moment, at 8 years old, I suspect that I laughed it off. Ignored it. Reassured the girl that I was her friend and that she could always play with me. After all, she was just reiterating the ignorance that had been sent her way. But the pain that was felt during that interaction was never fully processed and is something that resurfaced years later despite all of the things that have packed into my mind. I find myself thinking now, what could have prompted an older White lady to cast such a judgment onto an innocent child? To fundamentally alter the perception of a young Black child’s character in the eyes of her White friend who had always played with her as an equal. Perhaps me and the girl had a small disagreement, as many little girls do, but nothing that a child could do could ever warrant that type of categorical outcasting by a caregiver. To suggest that a child — already a visible minority in that community — was not good, painted her as a threat, and the fact that she could openly say this to a White little girl told me — even years later — that I had a target on my back from childhood. There was nothing that I could ever do to change that. This traumatic experience served as a microcosm of how Black life was regarded in modern-day America.
This feeling is affirmed when I watch Black people be slaughtered by police officers on the news. I think about the New Mexico police officer wrestling an 11-year-old girl to the ground for violating “several school rules after standing on a school bus, taking too many milks at the school cafeteria, and picking at a sign taped to the door (2019),” things that any child could have been caught doing. I think about Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, shot and killed in a Walmart in Cleveland by police officers for holding a toy gun that bystanders perceived to be a real weapon (2014). I think about the police officer in Texas who forced a 15-year-old girl in a bathing suit to the grown at a birthday party because she was asked to leave too times (2015).
In these instances right before police moved with excessive force or pulled the trigger (Tamir Rice), I wonder if they thought to themselves “this is not a good child” as a way to justify their actions. These three instances of police brutality, in particular, show an uncanny paradox: the law is supposed to protect us from things that are not good, threatening, dangerous; yet a child, who many would argue represent the purest form of goodness because of their innocence, is still traumatized, is still disrupted, and in one case, is still slain. If a child’s Black body has always been deemed bad, or even unworthy, then the child (who is a precious life) never has a chance to register in a police officer or a racist’s mind as being something that we need to protect. It doesn’t matter if you attended the best school or live in the best neighborhood, as soon as a judgement is casted within their minds, your life is no longer protected. It is no longer a life. It is simply a threat. And your job becomes to survive.
So as a young Black person, trying to figure out who exactly they will be, where they will be, and how they will live, I think about the late Ahmaud Arbery (2020) in Georgia and the late George Floyd (2020) in Minnesota as well as Christian Cooper in NYC; grown adults, minding their own business, and still maintaining the job of surviving because of the target placed on their back. *Ahmaud, shot and killed by two White men while jogging in a neighborhood in broad day light, George, arrested from the confines of his own vehicle on an alleged forgery charge and later suffocated to death by the knee of a White police officer, in broad daylight, and Christian, who was bird-watching in broad daylight and had his life threatened by a White woman who knows her power and credibility in spewing lies to police in order to end her discomfort with being told that she is wrong by a Black man. Each context was different, but all of them underscored the same issue: each White antagonist who led to their demise relied on the fact that the Black man that they saw was inherently flawed and did not deserve to live since their existence threatened them. All of these antagonists relied on the fact that they themselves would always be “good” and credible in the eyes of the law while the Black men they preyed on would be left defenseless and culpable in the justice system.
For Ahmaud and George, they never had an opportunity to live through their life’s purpose, although I know they made their families proud and achieved greatness in various instances of their lives. But to know that what they answered as a child when someone asked them what they wanted to be was now irrelevant because their life was so dispensable by the law — so much so that it took two months after Ahmaud’s death to warrant an investigation and the arrests of his killers, and that the other police officers who surrounded George’s body and heard his cries did not care enough to intervene and save him— is absolutely life-altering for the young Black person in America. Again, as a 21-year-old in the midst of a global pandemic that already disproportionately kills Black people due to inaccessible resources, the things that I want to do in my life have changed shape because of the continued history of police brutality and the slaughtering of Black people, and the overwhelming thought that I have a target on my back forever.
I don’t want my only job in this life to be survival. I especially don’t want it to be the biggest feat that I have to overcome everyday. I want to be an activist, a humanitarian, a successful entrepreneur, an academic and I want to run, drive a car, attend a birthday party, walk through the isles of Walmart, go to school, and walk through a park without feeling like my life is going to flash before my eyes and everything that I’ve worked for is shattered. Most importantly, I want to be able to make small mistakes without feeling like my life will be taken because of them.
This piece is not to solicit pity from anyone, it’s to help society understand the pain that Black youth experience when these tremendous tragedies ensue. It’s to incite action from non-Black people without circulating traumatizing videos of Black people getting killed on the news and the internet. It’s to explain that even though White progressives believe that they are down for the cause or woke because they know about these issues, does not alone help the fact that another body could be slain in cold blood, and it could be anyone of their Black friends or peers. It’s to plead with them to not only raise their children with empathy but to encourage their partners and families to understand what’s really going on so that they don’t categorize young Black people, especially young Black children, as dispensable because they are seen as inherently threatening to their whiteness. Lastly, this piece is to help further a movement where Black youth can creatively express their feelings and trauma surrounding this topic through writing.
Sidenotes:
*I believe we need to start calling Black victims of police brutality by their first names in writing like this. They were people before they became headlines. They were someone’s world before their names reminded us of injustice. Do not forget that.
*We need to see more images that depict these fallen Black bodies as people and not objects of destruction. It is traumatizing.
*I’m sad that I even feel the need to write this but racists do not automatically equal police. Police do not automatically equal racists. And White people do not automatically equal racists. And racists do not automatically equal White people. They can equal those things, which is what this piece helps to show, but many of them do not. There are plenty of amazing police officers and White people in this world. Many of whom will most likely read this piece. But this piece is to highlight that those demographics are not exempt in encouraging anti-blackness, even if their intentions are better.
