The Weight

I Will Rise

A Time to Kill

The scene below is from the closing arguments of the trial in the movie, “A Time to Kill”.  I still remember watching that closing scene, the horror had unfolded early in the movie, we thankfully didn’t see the details, but still, hearing Matthew McConaughey so eloquently and brutally detail it was chilling.  And the final line made me choke and brought tears to my eyes. 

I've left out some of the more graphic parts of the dialogue because it is just too painful to recount.

I want to tell you a story.  I’m going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story.  I want you to listen to me.  I want you to listen to yourselves.  Go ahead.  Close your eyes, please.  This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon.  I want you to picture this little girl.  Suddenly a truck races up.  Two men jump out and grab her.  They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body.  Now they climb on.  First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat.  …. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge.  Pitch her over the edge.  And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below.  Can you see her?  Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die.  Can you see her?  I want you to picture that little girl.

Now imagine she’s white

I’m going to present three scenarios for you, all of them real-life scenarios that I’ve experienced.  As you read through these, I’d like you to envision the situation, similar to above, but also, maybe put yourself or one of your children in the scenario and see how you would react or feel in that situation.  I would also like you to consider how does the color of someone’s skin impact each of these situations?  Because whether we like it or not, believe it or not, the color of someone’s skin colors how we view things and clearly changes how the legal system deals with the outcome.

Scene 1

About 14 years ago, we moved to Lawrenceville, Georgia, we had come from Ohio.  We found a beautiful home, we are in the back of a cul-de-sac, and our backyard is completely covered in trees.  When they are in full bloom, you can’t even see any of the neighbors’ houses.  There are a bazillion squirrels in the backyard, I always said that Laurel bought this house for Snickers, he was our dog at the time, and he was a beagle who loved to chase the squirrels.  Now it’s Daisy who does this.

We were in our home a brief period of time, and as I looked out the backdoor, I saw a young man walking through my backyard, carrying a rifle.  I’ll have to admit, I’ve never experienced something like this in my life.  I watched as he walked through our yard, and then left just as he came.  We subsequently found out, he was one of our neighbor’s son, and apparently he was hunting squirrels. 

As the years have gone by, I’ve wondered, what if?  What if I had panicked, what if I would have grabbed a gun, and done something stupid?  What if in that moment, I confronted the young man, what if he turned toward me and I thought he was going to shoot me, what if out of fear, I had shot him and killed that young man?  How would I feel?  How devastating would that be to take a life, a life that I had no business taking, a life that should have many years of love, marriage, children, grandchildren ahead of it?  How much pain would I feel for the rest of my life?  What would his parents think, how would they react, what would have happened to me, would I have gone to jail for committing murder?  Quite frankly, I should have if it would have happened.

But what if he were black?

Scene 2

Stupid me (unfortunately many of my stories start this way), I was taking Sean to soccer practice at a local park after work.  That morning, I grabbed a long sleeve t-shirt, sweat pants, and tennis shoes, so that I could run that night at the park while Sean practiced, the park had a really nice trail that curved through the woods.  Going back to the introduction, my error was that I grabbed a black t-shirt, black sweat pants, and on top of it, a black baseball cap for my run.  To make matters worse, it was fall, and it was getting darker earlier, so by the time I was probably midway through my run, it was dark on the trails, and I really had a hard time even seeing where I was going.

As I was getting close to the end of my run, I looked ahead, and there were headlights coming toward me on the trail, which was very strange, as I noted, this was a running trail through the woods.  As I got closer, the lights kept coming toward me.  As I got close to the car, I was blinded by the lights, and I tried going around it on the driver’s side.  Just as I was passing the front of the car, the driver’s door swung open.  I had that instantaneous panic attack, thinking I’m about to be mugged.  I then saw the lights on top of the car, it was a police car, and it was a police officer getting out of the car.  He asked me to stop, which I did, and he started talking to me.  In my state of panic, I forgot my music was still playing through my earbuds, and I finally turned the music off.

As I stood there, panting, scared, wondering what the heck was going on, I noticed there was another police officer coming around from the other side, and he was younger, and he was eyeing me up pretty closely.  The first officer started questioning me, what was I doing, where had I come from, etc.  I was quickly trying to come to my senses, and trying to figure out why I was being stopped by the police, and I’ll have to admit, I was scared to death.  I had no idea what I had done wrong.

The conversation soon turned to the reason.  Apparently, a woman had been assaulted in the neighborhood adjacent to the park, and I matched the description of the possible suspect.  The first officer was older, he seemed, and was, very reasonable, and I think, soon realized, I wasn’t the perpetrator of the attack.  Still, at one point, the younger officer, who continued to eye me up, asked me to lift up my shirt, I guess to see if I was carrying a weapon.  After what seemed to be hours of questioning (I’m pretty sure it was about 10 minutes), they let me go, but with a stern warning from the first officer.  “Don’t run in the dark, dressed all in black!”  I could only say, “I know, I know, it will never happen again!”

After the incident, when I went home and relayed the entire ordeal to Laurel, what crossed my mind, particularly in relation to the younger police office, what if?  What if the younger officer thought I was trying to run, I wasn’t going to stop when I went around the police car?  What if he thought I was running toward the first officer, what if he thought I was planning on attacking the first officer?  How would he react, he seemed far less experienced, and far more suspicious of me. 

What if I had been black?

Scene 3

I think we’ve all experienced those stories that we hear years later of what our children did that it’s probably a good idea that we never knew when they actually happened.

When Patrick was in college and he would come home for the summer, he apparently developed this habit of going up to our neighborhood pool in the middle of the night for a swim.  He’d climb the fence, swim for a while, and then when he was done, he’d go into the clubhouse, it was unlocked, and take an ice cream bar out of the freezer.  We were horrified when we heard of this.  First, he was technically trespassing, the pool closes at 10 or so at night.  Second, while the clubhouse was unlocked, he was stealing, admittedly minor theft, but theft. 

We told him once we found out how lucky he was that no one caught him.  What if one of our neighbors had noticed what was happening, ice cream bars were gradually disappearing from the clubhouse.  They start watching and see that someone is breaking into the pool, hopping the fence and swimming at night.  What if they decided to confront the perpetrator, and when they reached the clubhouse, and Patrick was coming out, somehow they thought they saw a weapon on him, or Patrick reacted in a defensive manner, and they shot and killed him.  How would they have felt, how would we have felt, would this be a criminal offense punishable by jail time, would this person go to jail, even though Patrick had committed a crime?

What if Patrick were black?

Over the years, I’ve always enjoyed walking through houses under construction.  It’s fun to see a house going up, what it looks like in progress, and seeing it come to its final conclusion.  I’ve never thought much of it, never thought that there was anything wrong with it.  I grew up that way, as a little kid my Dad would take me places, and we’d look at new construction, it was fun to do.  I guess I’m lucky, I never knew that if you toured a construction site, you could be hunted down and murdered for your transgressions.

And I’ve been a runner for probably 40 years or so.  Not a great runner, I always say I’m like a plow horse when I run, but I do enjoy running.  Thankfully, I can’t ever think of a time or imagine a couple of Billy Bob’s coming after me with guns when I was running.  I hate to say it, but I have too much of my Dad in me, and no matter how bad the odds were and how stupid it was, I probably wouldn’t back down.  I could easily see continuing my run and telling them to fuck off or confronting them and telling them to put the gun down and man up.  In either case, sadly, I’d probably be another justified homicide, or self-defense or whatever the rationale would be for the killing.  But wait, maybe not, I forgot….

I’m white

Were You There?

Heroes