Ya know what? Let’s talk about it.
Black and Brown parents have The Talk with their kids. Little girls get a different kind of The Talk from the women in their lives. Jewish and Muslim kids get a version of it too. LGBTQ+ families have a version too. All for certain scenarios.
What do you do if you run into a situation where you are singled out for who you are and aggression — maybe even violence or death — is likely to come your way? The Talk is always given in a way where we, the potential victim, are told to do our best to be calm, collected, proper, polite. We are supposed to do everything right. Whether you are a Black father giving The Talk to your son about how to interact with the police or a mother explaining to her daughter how to avoid date rape or a Muslim family explaining how to avoid an anti-Muslim confrontation to your teen daughter newly wearing the hijab or an Asian-American parent talking to your child about what to do if confronted with anti-Asian hate: You know I’m right.
I know what I’d do because I’ve lived through several situations, some where I’ve frozen, some where I’ve ran and some where I’ve fought back. I know what I was supposed to do in each scenario, but my fight-flight-freeze response took over — because I’m human.
I survived in every situation. I’m lucky. My body froze when it needed to freeze. I ran when I needed to run. I fought back when I needed to fight back. But what if I hadn’t?
When I saw Tyre Nichols get up from the first set of beatings and run, I saw a person running for his life. I saw fear. I’ve felt that. But he was running from five police officers with weapons who caught him and beat him so severely that his injuries were fatal; there was no escaping that outcome.
Perhaps you’ve never been in a situation where you were confronted with the possibility of violence just because of who you are — just because of the color of your skin, or your gender, or your religion, or your disability, or anything that makes you different from those who hold power in a situation. If you haven’t, imagine yourself in that scenario and tell me what you would do. You imagine you’d do everything right, everything your elders told you to do. And still you are beaten. Still you are raped. Still you are terrorized. Still you are hunted. Still you are murdered.
This is the America – née the World — far too many of us know.