Op-Ed: A black son, white parents and ‘the conversation’ about police

The conversation has been coming for years now. It has been coming since Tamir Rice, and before that, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and before that, Trayvon Martin, when our son was only 2. But he is almost 7 now, and my wife wanted to have the conversation long ago. Not yet, I said; he’s only 4, he’s only 5, he’s only 6. Let him not know just a bit longer. But she is right: The time has come.

We adopted Dangiso when he was 13 months old and almost immediately we started to tell him his story. We explained that he was born in Ethiopia and that we are his family — his mother and father — but that he also has family there too, an Ethiopian father and nine siblings. It didn’t take long for him to ask my wife if he had been inside her belly. When she told Dangiso that he had not, he asked whose belly he had been inside.

“Your Ethiopian mama’s,” my wife said.

“Where is she?” Dangiso asked.

“She died,” my wife said.

Dangiso took in this information, and then he changed the subject. Not long after this, we told him he had had a twin sister who died as an infant. As much as we wanted to protect our son from painful truths, we knew he had to know.

Now there are more painful truths. Dangiso, a black boy with white parents, is growing up in a white neighborhood and attending a predominantly white private school in a country where blacks — especially young black men — are not safe. In other words, we must tell our son that he must follow a distinct set of rules, different from his parents, different from most of his friends.

We have already edged into it. After Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, was shot and killed while holding an Airsoft replica gun in Cleveland, we explained to Dangiso that he was to play with his Nerf gun only in our backyard, and that if his friends ever played with a toy gun that wasn’t bright blue and orange — marking it as an obvious toy — he was never to touch it.

We even explained that people who looked like him weren’t always treated fairly by some police officers. It hurt to say. Dangiso is joyful, social, playful, unafraid of the world, and we don’t want this to change. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, sometimes he answers that he wants to be a baseball player, but most often he says he wants to be a police officer. Three Halloweens running he has dressed up as one. We think it might be his calling: Even at 6, he is very aware of rules; he believes in fairness; he is brave and resilient and loves to help others.

If Dangiso were to become a police officer some day, we would worry about him — it is a dangerous job, as the horrific shooting in Dallas demonstrated — but no matter what he becomes, we will worry, and for different reasons than our friends whose children are white.

Most people don’t blink when they see us, two white parents and a black son, and sometimes that tricks us into forgetting about the violent, complicated past and present of race in America. We are reminded when a woman at church asks whether we’re sponsoring Dangiso through the Fresh Air Fund. We are reminded when someone posts a message on our neighborhood listserv to be on the lookout for kids wearing hoodies.

And we are reminded by Baton Rouge, La., Minnesota and Dallas.

“He needs to know,” my wife said, and she is right. The full conversation has to happen: Be polite to police officers; don’t make any sudden movements; if an officer asks to see your identification, ask the officer’s permission before reaching into your pocket; if you are mistreated, comply first and contest later; as soon as you are able to, call us. We will explain all this now and later, and still it may not keep him safe.

Four years after we adopted Dangiso, we returned to Ethiopia. While we drove seven hours from Addis Ababa to Arbegona, where our son was born, Ferguson, Mo., burned. We saw it on TV screens at the lakeside resort where we stopped to rest. Dangiso, then 5, pointed at the screen and said, “Look, a fire!” We weren’t ready for the conversation then, especially not as we were about to visit Dangiso’s birth family.

We drove the final three hours over dirt roads surrounded by lush green farmland. It was raining when we arrived at the hut where Dangiso’s family lives. They welcomed us into their home, where we told them about his life in the United States — how he loves to play soccer and baseball, how he has many friends, how he’s doing well in school. They poured water over our hands into a basin and fed us; they sang us songs. Dangiso happily played soccer in the rain with two of his brothers while family and neighbors watched. We took a walk across the fields. Whenever we lost our footing in the mud, a hand reached out to steady us; an elderly man let me use his walking stick.

By the time we reached the car again, our boots were covered in mud. I saw one of Dangiso’s older brothers cleaning my wife’s boots with a leaf the size of his palm. I picked up a leaf and started to wipe my own boots, but a hand grabbed mine, its grip strong. It was Dangiso’s grandmother. She shook her head no, took the leaf from me, and cleaned my boots.

We thanked everyone, hugged goodbye and promised to return. As we left, Dangiso’s father said one more thing. It was translated from Sidamo into Amharic and then from Amharic into English: “We will be praying for you,” my son’s father said. “And for your country.”

Nicholas Montemarano is an English professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. His latest novel is “The Book of Why.”

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