Your American skin

Last week, to keep Eli entertained on the train to Thanksgiving in New Jersey, I bought him a box at Barnes & Noble. Inside were nine miniature board books, all of them about different emergency rescue vehicles.

I was telling my mother, somewhat flippantly, that I didn't wholly enjoy reading him the one about police cars. Because it begins: You call the police when you need help...

And I didn't feel so sure about that anymore.

My mom, who is a 4'10" middle-aged white woman who enjoys (a) Seinfeld, (b) Cathy cartoons and (c) the Off-Broadway show 25 Questions For a Jewish Mother, looked around self-consciously as if she was afraid someone would hear her and then whispered furtively: "I don't trust cops."

Should she? Yesterday at my desk I was transfixed by these powerful photos of protests around New York City following the grand jury decision not to indict the officer who choked Eric Garner. There's one of a black man holding a large sign that says I COULD BE NEXT. There's a young black boy holding a sign that repeats: Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. There's a man with a rag over his mouth whose sign says AFRAID OF THOSE WHO SWORE TO PROTECT ME.

Because I grew up white and middle-class in the northeast, the racial narrative of my childhood hinged on two major historical events: the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Black people used to be enslaved, and that was wrong. One hundred years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks said, "This isn't fair!" and then black people were allowed to sit in the front of the bus. The end. When I was in elementary school, I had a friend who was black. She didn't live in my neighborhood; she rode the bus to school. (They used to call this "being bussed in.") I liked to hold hands with her underneath our desks because I liked the way her skin looked next to mine. Basically I thought we would make a good Gap ad.

More than ten years later I was a student teacher in a 1st-grade classroom in the lily-white suburbs of Boston, where the school librarian showed my class a film about Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to integrate an all-white school in Louisiana in 1960. There was one black girl in the class, and her name was Vanessa. My students kept referring to Ruby Bridges as "the Vanessa in the movie," and the film made them uncomfortable in the way only white people confronted with racism can feel uncomfortable. They felt benevolent, like rescuers: "But we let Vanessa come to our school!" they said generously. Even at 6 and 7 years old, they seemed to know instinctively that they were the ones in power.

For years, I've had the luxury of feeling nothing more than vaguely uneasy when confronted with these stories. But they thought he had a gun, or but he shouldn't have robbed that store. "People really don't get shot and killed by police officers every day for no reason," said someone on my Facebook page. 

 In 1999, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about the shooting death of Amadou Diallo; the lyrics went: Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life. It ain't no secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin.

The death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was shot by police officers in Cleveland two seconds after they arrived on scene, makes me more than just uncomfortable or uneasy. It makes me angry. It makes me sad. It makes me certain that our system has failed, somewhere along the way, to train police officers to respond appropriately.

But I still have the luxury of feeling angry and sad and disappointed without fearing for my life -- because I can still say, with reasonable certainty, that even if I were to rob a store or reach for my waistband at an inopportune moment in front of a police officer, I still wouldn't be shot dead. And that seems like a fundamental inequality, an irrevocable loophole in our society. One that we haven't grappled with because the narrative is supposed to be: We are equal. We are colorblind. We treat everyone the same.

I think there is powerful evidence that this is not the case in America. I'm not sure where we go from here.

Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it in your heart? Is it in your eyes?