It was 1949; I was five, and I didn’t know my body was black.  I was the son of a migrant who purchased his first home in the city of Baltimore on the east side.  My first best friend was white, as it was an all-white block within the neighborhood.  Our friendship came to an end in 1950 when we started school, and we went our separate ways.  He abruptly stopped talking to me, and the friendly smile went away; I didn’t know why.

Although following my dream of pursuing my education, in 1960, I became a high school dropout because of racial bullying.  The connotation of a dropout is not very bright, rebellious, and a burden on society.  In April 2016, a youth with a BB gun resembling a firearm was shot by police in East Baltimore.  The Police Commissioner, Kevin Davis, an honorable man, stated: “He could not wrap his head around (because he had teens) a child leaving home with a replica of a gun.”  It’s understandable; the problem is, neither he nor their children have lived through the learned experiences of fear and survival that inner-city youth face.  Many have never visited or physically seen the abandoned houses of economically deprived neighborhoods.

        In 1960, being racially bullied, if I had access to even a replica, I might have carried it to school because the school administration, “Baltimore City College High School,” did not protect me. I cannot speak for the young man with the BB gun, but I have experienced fear and the psychological effect it can have.  Poverty, joblessness, and educational deficiency are the proving grounds for drugs and crime.  Black youth will spontaneously run, not because they have done wrong but because they don’t trust the law with their lives. The police aren’t the only fear inner city youth deal with on a regular basis.   A gun in the hands of a teenager can be a symbol of power. I’m not in favor of carrying any weapon by youth, just a statement of fact.  On the other side of the coin, there’s workplace violence and victims of bullying who simply give up and commit suicide.  When this happens, the Monday morning quarterbacking begins, as usual. Someone should have seen it coming!  Give me a break.  Whether it’s one-on-one or an entire group of people, racism and genderism are the elephants in the room, compounded by economic depravity, but the blind eye is always there.  African Americans have had to deal with setbacks in the fight against the ugliness of slavery since the party of Lincoln.  Every attempt at moving forward came to an antithesis “against” racial advancement as if it were a germ.  From Reconstruction came Jim Crow, along with peonage.  From forty acres and a mule came carpetbaggers and sharecropping.  From desegregation came white flight and redistricting.  From Black Power came White Power.  From the Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action came the claim of reverse discrimination. From voting rights came the allegations of voter fraud, spearheading new voting rights laws.  From “Black Lives Matter” came “All Lives Matter.”  Not that all lives don’t matter, but the antidote lessened the attention.  All lives matter, making the number of black males killed at the hands of police across the nation seem trivial.

        I am encouraged by the number of whites who demonstrated with “Black Lives Matter” at a police convention recently in Baltimore.  Although I am sure they’ve received backlash from (workers of the antidotes) individuals who support the comments of an official from the police union in an email sent out in a formal department memo.  In the email, the official stated union members attending the state FOP conference should “expect more bad behavior from the THUGS OF BALTIMORE,” referring to protesters outside the Hyatt Regency Baltimore. “On the bright side, maybe they will stop killing each other while they are protesting us.” 

              I have had to deal with language from this type of mentality consistently for most of my life.  It took an internal investigation by the Justice Department to inform the police department that the elephant was in the room, running the show, not that they didn’t know.  I would invite the writer of the email to read my book, “Guidance Against the Odds,” and also “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, another Baltimore native, or ask him to live with an inner-city black family restrictively for thirty days.   He would be surprised by how poor, law-abiding citizens would welcome and prayerfully accept his presence.  At the conclusion, send another email to the next FOP conference with his findings.  Without some effort on his part, I don’t believe his views will ever change.  This is a pipe dream when people of this mindset don’t think they are the problem.