Mike Brown’s life will not be in vain: A lesson in telling my children the truth
Last night a grand jury did not bring back an indictment against Officer Darren Wilson in the homicide of 18-year-old Mike Brown. Unlike many Americans, I didn’t find out about the decision on my social media feeds or while watching television. I found out while I was putting my three children to bed.
My three children and I are visiting my brother and sister-in-law in New York City for the Thanksgiving holiday. Just as my kids were dosing off to sleep in the guest room, I heard loud shouts that grew louder, the sounds of people marching, and blaring police sirens that seemed to get closer and closer to our apartment building. In that moment, I knew that the grand jury failed to bring an indictment against Darren Wilson. Tears immediately welled my eyes and heart sank to a familiar place of devastation as I lay in bed with my children.
As the sounds of the protestors and the blaring sirens and a helicopter buzzing grew louder and louder, each of my children jumped out of bed and ran straight to the windows to look outside. My almost eight year old daughter, sensing this wasn’t the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, shouted in a panic, “Mama, what happened?!”
I said nothing. In my own anxiety of the moment, I didn’t know how to answer my daughter’s pleading question. I desperately wanted to get them to bed so I could watch the news and confirm what my heart already knew. And, so I said, “I don’t know. Go back to bed.”
My middle child, who is six, pressed on, “Mama! Something is happening. Why are the police shouting at the people?”
I replied, “They’re trying to keep them safe.”
They both replied in disbelieving unison, “Mamaaa!”
In the panic of the moment, I lied because I didn’t know what else to say. I told them that I thought that there may have been some kind of night bike ride or a race of some sort happening and the police were just keeping everyone safe from the cars. And, so they went back to bed.
As soon as I tucked them each back in, I ran out and joined my sister-in-law and brother as we consumed the horrifying news for hours. Like many others last night, we sat and rocked in our shock, our anger, our tears, and our uselessness against the twenty-headed monster that is systemic, institutionalized racism in America.
As we stayed up into the morning hours, my sister-in-law asked me about my conversation with the children and I admitted to her that I rushed them back to sleep and completely disavowed the reality of what was happening outside. Something she responded back to me with gently reminded me that I have had difficult conversations with my children before. That children are resilient and they deserve an appropriate version of the truth.
This morning, my older two woke up before I did and raced out into the living room to see my sister-in-law who was preparing to head out for work. I overheard them pepper her with questions about the ‘bike race’. They were still thinking about it.
I realized that I had made a mistake and that there was still a window to correct it. I made my way into the room and told them that I had made a mistake the night before. There had not been any nighttime bike race and that I wanted to tell them the truth.
We talked about Martin Luther King and the civil rights heroes that they had learned about in school. We talked about how their struggle continues on. That people are still unfair and sometimes laws apply differently to black people than they do white people. We talked about our rights as Americans to protest when we think something is wrong or unfair. We talked about God and how our Muslim faith calls for us to do something when we something unjust happening, especially when it affects a lot of people and especially when it is due to the way that people look or where they are from.
We didn’t talk a lot about the details of Ferguson, but we focused on the big ideas. During our conversation, they didn’t have a lot of relevant questions but I also know that their little brains were processing and thinking. In some moments, I think they got it. In others, I saw them flipping around the couch and making silly jokes. When they did that, I tried to remind them and myself that this was an ongoing conversation that we would continue. We stopped when they had seemed to have had enough.
Through this conversation, I was once again reminded that although what we tell our children must be developmentally appropriate, the truth we must tell. I understand the desire to ‘let them be little’, to keep our children sweetly innocent for as long as possible. However, innocence grounded in falsehood will not create children who are prepared for the world they will enter as adults.
Just as we try our best to teach our children how to thrive in the world, we must also try our best to teach them how to thrive with others. Our children need us to teach them about justice and their respective roles in serving it. Beyond this lofty goal, perhaps there is something more simple in teaching our children about difficult truths. As they learn and uncover that painful unfairness is a consequence of people who care only about themselves, they may also learn to embrace complexity; so that when they do uncover complex and ugly realities, they will not be shattered by the weight of them.
Maybe one of our goals as parents is to do our best to prepare our children for a complex world in which they may witness or, God forbid, even be hurt by monsters in their own lives. However, in being the ones to teach our children about the capacity for darkness, we can also be the ones to teach them about the great capacity for beauty in humanity. If we succeed, and when they need it most, our children may recall that for as long as they can remember they have heard the stories of people who have resisted and struggled against real twenty-headed monsters.
So although I myself am still processing the injustice of Mike Brown’s death and the death of countless others like him, I can at least tell my children about Ferguson and Cleveland and Chicago and New York. My children might know about unfairness before I would have liked, but they will also know of beauty, empathy, resilience, and what it looks like when people have a deeply internalized call towards justice. They will know what resilience looks like. They will know what the world looks like, the good and the bad of it, the simple and the complex of it.
As I was writing my thoughts down later this morning, my elder daughter came into the room and said to me, “Thank you, Mama, for telling me what happened last night. It’s just not fair.”
This time when I was silent in response, I didn’t feel so bad as I hugged her close. When she let go, she smiled and we went on with our beautiful, sad day.
(Photo Source: People’s World)
As the Managing Director of Arete at the University of Chicago, Samar Kaukab works to launch complex initiatives that enhance UChicago’s research enterprise and is Mama to three children.
