This weekend we saw three people get arrested. Two of them were Black. Out of the three people, the white man getting arrested was clearly treated more humane then the Black man and woman.
I have a lot of feelings around this but as we were discussing it with the kids and as I was processing through seeing these arrests, I realized we needed to talk this through as a family. I told the kids how I didn’t like that we saw more Black people getting arrested and how this doesn’t mean Black people are bad, it just means society doesn’t always give them the same choices I was given growing up.
It’s all those little choices that cause someone to have to make a choice that could get them arrested. Those choices could include not providing mental health services, providing shitty education to youth, or showing kids they don’t matter because their bedroom walls are duck tapped together and not fixed properly.
It’s those choices that make a zip code of people that others want to distance because of the decisions. But the decisions were due to the limited choices that so many in my zip code are given.
I keep hearing that we are all the same but so many never know their worth. How can we shift to provide solutions and not judge people for the limited choices they are given?