As I sit here thinking of what I find most important to say, so many thoughts swirl within my mind. My husband and I are currently expecting our fourth child—a baby boy! The excitement I felt was quickly accompanied by the sore realization that our son will be born into a world that hates him. And, as a result, we are going to be forced to have conversations with him that our non-POC counterparts will never be forced to have with their sons. And that is sobering. So, I turn to what I know works: prayer.
I recently found myself praying for my son’s life. What was odd is that I wasn’t praying for his health or for his safe delivery and arrival, but I was praying for his life after his birth—simply praying that he doesn’t become a statistic and a victim of police violence. It is in that moment that I realized that the death of George Floyd has affected me more deeply than I recognized.
I am praying that the police do not kill either of our sons. I pray that instead of a short-lived life, that our sons can grow up, thrive, go to college, travel the world, and have experiences that they can tell their children about. I pray that when they are beyond our reach that no harm will come upon them at the hands (or knees) of law enforcement, and that these agencies won’t ever have the opportunity to cover up their misdeeds. I pray that if, God forbid, something happens to our sons, that law enforcement won’t be able to partner with other governmental agencies, like the county medical examiner, and release false information about the cause of their death, requiring us as a family to delay the process of celebrating the life of our son in order to perform another autopsy to uncover the truth that we already knew.
I pray that if I have to speak out against what has happened to our child that people of color will unite with us for the cause of saving another Black man from such a fate instead of using the opportunity to steal and “come up.” I pray that our non-POC friends would unite with us instead of telling us that “Black Lives Matter” is crap because “All Lives Matter.”
I stay on my knees in prayer because I don’t wish this agony on anyone, especially not our Black sons in America.
