What Does It Tell You When a Two-Year-Old Black Child Is Terrified of Police?

January 12, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a reader:

A woman who is the mother of a Black youth killed by the police in 2007 and who is active in Rise Up October told me the police came to her house looking for one of her sons—something to do with his car. When the police came to the door, her two-year-old grandson looked at the police and asked, “Are you going to shoot my uncle? Are you going to kill my uncle?” The police said, “No, we just want to talk to him.” Think about what this says about how deeply ingrained in the minds of Black people, even a two-year-old, is the fear that the police might hurt or kill someone they love. This is the fear every Black person lives with in Amerikkka, even as young as two years old.

In the speech titled Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, in the section "Emmett Till and Jim Crow: Black people lived under a death sentence," Bob Avakian (BA) makes that point: “Listen to the following statement by the author of a book about lynching. He said, ‘It is doubtful that any Black male growing up in the rural South in the period 1900 to 1940 was not traumatized by a fear of being lynched.’ What is he saying with this? Nothing less than this: no Black male growing up in the rural South in that period could be free of that fear. Every Black male was haunted and scarred deeply by that fear. Think about what that means and think about how this touched Black people as a whole….”

And later, BA says: “It is doubtful that there is a young Black male, growing up in the U.S. today, in the South or the North, who does not have a very real fear of being brutalized or even murdered by the police. And again, this touches all Black people.”

 

 

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