Cautious Parents Impart Lessons of How to Behave Around Authority Figures - washingtonpost.com: These are not new lessons taught to black children sitting at the dinner table.
They are old lessons, repeated in an oral tradition for survival. Told by grandmothers with wrinkled hands, grandfathers who saw something way back when, worried mothers talking in hypotheticals.
They are lessons you don't want to teach a child because it could make him feel vulnerable, crack her innocence, pop this generation's colorblind bubble.
So you wait until it's absolutely necessary and relevant, and explain it like this:
If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite. Say: "Yes, sir. No, sir." Make no sudden movements. Do not try to run.
Why? they ask.
And that's when you tell them: You are a black child in America. There is a history here. So, baby, just be careful.
"I tell them if a police officer comes up to you, all you have to say is, 'Okay, officer. Yes, sir. Thank you.' Then move on. Don't say nothing smart," says James Thompson, whose son is 15 and tall for his age. He goes to school in Bethesda, has white friends, spends his time skateboarding through the streets. He's a baby, really, living in a "post-racial" world.
