A Note of Protection

The other day it happened.

I had to tell my 9 year old, without disguise, that racist danger was in close proximity. Not just the poor stereotypes, bad language, or structural inequality, which I will spare explaining for now. But the could knock your head sideways, like literally show you that they would love to come for your life. The one that comes lairy and emboldened from a whipped up hatred march. Drunk on substances and its own shortcomings. To find for it to land somewhere. And, as usual, the country fuels it. Allows it. Spreads it. Fails to protect the free speech from hate crimes. The difference of opinion from life-threatening danger.

And my system springs into action: get ready in a way that would make it the easiest, and fastest, in case of the need to run. Locate exits, find other black and brown people. From now on be alert. 

Look at the girl. My 9 year old. Look at her. Dozing on the train seat, filled up to the rim with joy of collecting pebbles at the beach. Tired from screaming and laughing while running into and away from the waves. Look at her, lying there. So sweet and happy.

And now I have time, all the time in the world, to decide whether to lie and get angry enough (for no apparent reason) so that she might, somehow, pick up that I mean it if I’d say ‘when I tell you to come we need to go, very quickly’. That somehow in her body she would believe me, just because of a false anger. Because otherwise, without anger, why would there be a reason for this urgency. And that she would know this is true, the reason, or the urgency, whichever one is easier to believe, and would actually follow me if it came to that. Without dragging her feet. Without ‘I’m tired.’ Without searching for an explanation. This smart child of mine. Who will debate and discuss to understand.

And in this lifetime, this endless amount of time I have to debate the chances of this,

that she would do as I say, just because I say so, without understanding why, which is to say the split second I have but which I have been in training for my whole life:

I decide. I don’t fake anger. I stay calm. And I say how it is.

From now on her mind too might get crowded. Her body will know. Time will become spacious and condensed, it will disappear. And she will learn, have to learn, to prepare. To know the steps so intimately they drag out in the moment. And she will, at some point, understand that protecting her means exposing her to the reality of that danger. Teaching her to read the signs. To be on the lookout. And to ignore the white people, who might vie for her attention, to show where they stand in this, but who nevertheless don’t share this moment, to teach her they live in a world entirely different. To locate them in case they might put themselves in the way but to ignore them, to not make connections with them, which some of them will be eager to make. Not in those moments. Because really, she won’t be having time for that.