On Thursday morning, I read about the shooting of Philando Castile, a young man in St. Paul, Minneapolis, shot by police in front of his girlfriend after being stopped for a broken tail light. Diamond Reynolds caught the entire event on her cell phone, live-streaming it to Facebook as it escalated from a routine incident of Driving While Black to gunshots fired by a police officer as Castile reached for his wallet to show his ID.
Another young black man, dead, and for no good reason.
An hour after I linked to the video, a good friend of mine — I’ll call her Teresa — posted her reaction to it. Teresa is African-American, a woman who has succeeded, with her husband, in achieving the American Dream. She has a successful writing career; her husband owns his own business, and they own a home in Hilton Head. They have a beautiful young daughter, the spitting image of her mother, who’s preparing to go to college this autumn. For Teresa, every shooting of every black man or woman is a reminder of the prejudice she faces every day. And for a mother about to see her only child leave home, away from where she can offer physical protection or comfort, those reminders feel like forebodings of disasters to come.
But Teresa wrote something that made me have to leave my desk, go outside, and cry.
I always wanted to have a son with deep brown skin. It's a fucking shame that now I am glad I did not.
What could I say to that?
Teresa is not a light-skinned woman. Her husband is darker, and I can imagine what she must have thought at times — what many women, I assume, have often wanted: If I have a boy, I want him to look just like his daddy, with all the features I love so much. And why not? I’m sure there are plenty of men and women who look at their sons and daughters and tell themselves, She looks so much like her mother, with those same beautiful eyes and smile. Look at how he holds himself, just like his father, so straight and still with that bashful little-boy’s grin. And skin color? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard mothers say, in front of and to me, I’m so damn glad she/he has such great skin . . . and occasionally, color has entered into it. Comparisons to everything from peaches and cream to mahogany or honey.
I don’t know how many light-skinned African American men are targeted by police or bullies every year as compared to those with darker complexions. Why even make that comparison from my position? I’m white. I will never be targeted because of my skin color for the things Teresa has faced on a daily basis. No one has ever refused to rent to me, or followed me through a store, or pulled me over and ticketed me for traffic violations that a white person would get a warning for at most.
I’m not going to nitpick over her words. I’m not going to say, “Well, but . . .” Because I will never know the tightening in the gut that she feels every day when her husband is late coming home from a project. I will never know the shudders that come when another case of police brutality exhibited towards of a woman of color is shown on the news. And I will never know the pain of looking at the man I love and thinking, I wanted a little boy who would have your skin color. And I’m glad I never will.