Program Success December 2014 | Page 6

Black Men Keep Getting Killed Blair Kelley Respectability , Accountability Jacksonville , Florida December 2014

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few weeks ago , one of America ' s leading voices on black respectability , Lawrence Otis Graham , wrote in the Washington Post about the realization that respectability had failed to protect his son from the barbs of racial bias . In spite of his efforts as a father to make his son appear to be as accomplished and educated as possible , two white men slurred and threatened his son . This verbal attack by strangers became doubly frightening for Graham when his son ' s school administrators did not take the incident seriously . They could not imagine what might be so frightening and traumatizing about being slurred .

For me the article was truly revelatory . Here was Graham , author of a book called Our Kind of People : Inside America ' s Black Upper Class , who worked to cultivate America ' s knowledge about a long-standing black American elite , now acknowledging that the artifice of appearing to be " good enough " had failed . His article lays bare the weakness at the heart of the politics of respectability : that no matter how neat , how well educated , how elite a black person might be , it actually provides little protection from people who can ' t imagine themselves in our shoes .

Perhaps respectability , as a strategy , is losing its currency . Graham is no longer convinced . Bill Cosby , the nation ' s most prominent voice on young black people pulling up their pants and having Eurocentric names , is dealing with his own problems right now . The Post ' s Nia-Malika Henderson wrote that even the president ' s calls for respectability are on the wane , so I was hopeful .

Then I heard about a toy-gun buyback in Cleveland . It ' s being organized in the wake of the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice , who was playing with a toy gun in a park . the officer and his partner called in the shooting , they reported that they had shot a black man around 20 years old . Even looking into the face of Tamir , who had the chubby face and smaller proportions of a child , with a toy in his hand , the police saw a man with a gun .

C01rununity organizations in Cleveland must be at a loss as to what to do . It is devastating to know that a child was gunned down for playing in the park . The folks organizing the toy-gun buyback have also planned c01rununity activities and educational programs . But the buyback was essential to their plans to " keep toy guns out of the hands of kids ." Not real guns out of the hands of poorly trained , racially biased police .

I get it . As a mother , I do not buy toy guns for my kids . They are not allowed to play first-person shooting games - I ' m not interested in having them play games that make quick disregard for human life the norn1 . But the problem here isn ' t Tamir Rice ' s behavior . It ' s the actions of the state , its failure to take the time to see Tamir , both in life and in death .

Generations ago , when African Americans faced the terror of lynching and race riots , we clung to notions that perhaps exhibiting behavior that was exemplary in the eyes of white Americans would shield us from violence . This etiquette of Jim Crow left black Americans in the terrible bind of constantly perforn1ing their submission to white Southerners , day after day . Diverting their eyes from the gaze of whites , jumping off sidewalks to let white people pass and saying a quick " Yes , sir " to every command were just some of the rules black Southerners living in the age of segregation adopted to survive . But the rules provided no guarantee , then or now .