The Stories Tamir Rice Makes Us Remember...

[DreamGypsy]

...from The New Yorker, News Desk, Today 10:48 AM

By Clint Smith...yes, the same Clint Smith who wrote Place Matters.

Each holiday season, as family members arrive and couches are unfolded, my household settles into a palpable nostalgia.
<snip>
This week, I found myself sitting with my old Boy Scout, and eventual Eagle Scout, uniform, something that lent itself to a series of such moments. This time, however, the mood was different. On Tuesday, as I sat on my couch holding the more than decade-old sash, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty announced that Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, would not be indicted. Rice, who was in possession of a toy gun in an open-carry state, was shot within two seconds of a police car arriving on the scene. My thumbs slid across the coarse piece of cloth, several of the sewn-in merit badges dangling loosely from the fabric. I looked down at the ones I had earned: canoeing, wood carving, forestry, first aid, environmental science. I thought about the journey to obtain each of them. The thumb cut open after a pocket knife slipped from an attempt to carve a malformed miniature turtle; the swelling of red, itchy skin as poison ivy was mistaken for raspberry bushes; the seemingly futile effort to get a fish—any fish—to believe that the rubbery amorphous figure dangling from the end of my pole was in fact a delicious worm. I look back at the blunders fondly now, indicative of a youthful naïveté that I often miss. And as clearly as I remember the merit badges that I earned, I remember just as clearly those I did not—specifically, rifle shooting and shotgun shooting.

<snip>

In my troop, run out of a Catholic church in New Orleans, I was one of the only black boys. This made me different in ways I could not fully appreciate then. But at the time, I knew it made me aware of how loudly I spoke, the language I used, how quickly I moved. Perhaps the most profound divergence was the way we talked about those last two badges. The young boys whose skin rendered them both normative and innocuous were eager to fire the gun. In my home, guns were not something to be earned or celebrated. Water guns and Nerf guns were not allowed outside. B.B. guns were not even a part of the conversation. I was raised by my parents to understand that, even as an eleven-year-old boy, my relationship to guns could never be the same as that of my friends at camp.

<snip>

My father had told me that these boys—boys who were my friends, who invited me over for sleepovers, birthdays, and football games—would grow up to be police officers, lawyers, judges. He told me that no sleepover could insure that I would not be on the receiving end of their guns or one of their gavels. Because it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even about them. It was not about how kind they were, for they may indeed have been kind. It was about a system that makes intention secondary, perhaps irrelevant. He did not say this to scare me. He said this because he knew what it meant to be a black boy in a country that wasn’t built for us—a country, in fact, that was built on the destruction of our bodies, whether for profit or for power. Right now they were just boys. I was just a boy. And still these guns were real and my skin was black.

As I sit on the couch this week, I keep thinking of these boys. The merit badges they would go on to receive. The way their hands gripped the guns. I think of Prosecutor Tim McGinty calling Tamir Rice’s death a “perfect storm of human error.” I think about what does or does not get called an error. I think of how, at the range, if you shot your gun too early they didn’t take the weapon away; they simply told you not to do it again, as long as you said you didn’t mean it.

[gwheezie]

1. My 11 year old black grandson

He's in scouts. When my husband was dying, he wanted him to have the knife his father gave him over 50 years ago when he was a boy scout. We accepted it gracefully because my white husband wanted something meaningful to pass to his grandson. And then my son in law quietly put it away. My grandson who loves scouts will never carry that knife and when he's grown and has a son, we will give it to him for his son, and if his father taught him well, he will quietly put it away.

[tishaLA]

2. wow. so powerfully simple.

thanks for sharing that.