TomGram: Frida Berrigan: "Are They Going to Kill Me?"

Frida Berrigan tries to console her young son when he asks about the police: "Are They Going to Kill Me?".

After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a three year old and how the very things that we encouraged in him — curiosity, openness, questioning authority — were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.

And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I’m sure we’ll hear for years to come).  And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible — for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well — when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police officer.

And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn’t think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, “Because it’s nuts!  And we’re nuts!” I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"

And then, of course, there’s the anxiety I have about how he’ll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom — the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.

Emphasis Mine

So how do you explain white privilege to a toddler? How do you explain that you are able to get better health-care, better schooling, better jobs, better wages, not go to gaol, not get shot by the police, and just live longer because of the colour of your skin?

And this has to be explained in an ideology that is based on equality of opportunity and merit-based outcomes.

How does one tell the truth while living a lie?