Keeping Their Children Safe
Days after President Trump ordered a surge of federal law enforcement agents in Washington, D.C., Charlene Golphin told her 17-year-old son that his curfew was being cut short by two hours. Ms. Golphin feared that as a Black boy, her son would be caught in the dragnet set up by officers tasked by the president with cracking down on the “roving mobs of wild youth” he accused of terrorizing the city. Her son, Atrayu Lee, argued that his mother was overreacting. He didn’t engage in the activities that could incite a negative interaction with the police, he said. He spent his free time working with local organizations and had stopped wearing hoodies or black track suits. Ms. Golphin didn’t want to hear it. “I said what I said,” she affirmed. The highly visible new patrols of federal agents and National Guard troops and President Trump’s declaration that young people are a threat to public safety has put Black parents on edge, prompting many of them to enforce stricter rules about going out and wade back into tough conversations about racial profiling and policing. For decades, Black parents have given what they describe as “the talk,” a set of guidelines for how their children, particularly boys, should interact with the police and try to avoid attention from law enforcement altogether. These conversations became heightened after the deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., prompting national attention to the problem of young Black men dying at the hands of the police. After the nationwide protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to policing reforms in cities across the country, some parents said they had felt comfortable enough to back off those conversations. Keith Flemons, a father of four who lives in Washington’s 6th Ward, was one of several who said they had hoped to let their children feel relatively free to live their lives. “What am I doing except increasing their anxiety?” he said. But the expanded federal presence has already had a transformative effect, with many families imposing strict new controls on their children. Tanji White, who lives in Ward 7, no longer allows her 16-year-old daughter, Tangi, to venture outside by herself. Instead, her grandfather takes her to school, Target, tennis practice and even to the corner store. Ms. White, a public school teacher in Maryland, is not happy with the solution. “I feel like this is a way of hindering her,” she said. “It’s a slippery slope because you do have to teach them to be independent.” Complicating the discussion is the fact that their children, especially those in areas where crime is high, like Wards 7 and 8, are among the potential victims of the street crime that Mr. Trump has said he wants to prevent. Shaquita Miles, 35, said she worried about her teenage son being stopped by a federal agent or becoming a victim of a crime “all the time.” She now has a list of precautions for him: If he encounters a law enforcement officer, he should be respectful and comply with orders. He should pay close attention to how he dresses — avoiding clothing that might draw attention from either the police or would-be robbers. And if he’s with a large group of friends, he should avoid places such as Navy Yard, the heavily gentrified neighborhood where the Washington Nationals play.
Some families expressed concern that federal agents or National Guard troops did not have the same cultural understanding of their neighborhoods as the local police. But for many, it is not just the federal crackdown that is upsetting. It is the sense that a brief window has been shut, a time when the country seemed open to moving beyond negative perceptions of Black people in general. When Mr. Trump described Washington as full of “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” some Black parents interpreted the message as racially coded. “Are we that much of a threat to society that we have to be policed like this?” Ms. Miles said. “There was some true equality that was starting to form within our nation, but now it’s just like we took 100 steps back.”
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