Too many Black mothers are weeping for their dead sons | Opinion

Ten years ago, Sybrina Fulton joined the Black mothers’ crying line.

She had lost her 17-year-old son, Trayvon, after he had walked too slowly in the rain at his father’s housing complex in Sanford. It made his killer, George Zimmerman, think he was “suspicious.”

Since then, more Black mothers have joined Fulton in the crying line, and still more are coming.

But Black mothers have been crying for centuries, mourning the sons they got … but did not get to keep.

Not in America.

Whether slave owners yanked your child from your arms during slavery, the KKK lynched him and hung him from a tree post, or a neighbor found him on the pavement last week after a drive-by shooting, mothers are crying.

We are powerless against systemic racism and the toxic environment that evolves because of it.

To be a member of the crying line, you need only give birth to a Black son. That’s it, then you try to keep him alive for the rest of your life. You advise, threaten, plead, shout and pray:

Boy, if they stop you, just do what they say. Don’t run. Look them in the eye. No, don’t look them in the eye. Don’t put your hands in your pocket. Don’t sound too smart. Don’t grin. Don’t go outside. Come straight home. Don’t fight back.

Last resort: Boy, I’m whipping you now so that you learn your lesson. Better me than (the “master,” the overseer, the Klan, the police).

Years ago, our oldest son was playing outside of our house in Kendall. He was 9. We had not yet had the “talk.” A police officer questioned him and brought him home alive.

I had escaped the crying line.

Black mothers in America are consigned to a war we should not have to fight and are not supposed to win. Our eyes seemingly never dry because every day something happens or is waiting to happen that can turn a walk home, a drive to the store, a jog through the neighborhood, an unlocking of a front door, a whistling at a white girl in Mississippi into a death sentence for our children.

After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 9½ minutes, Floyd called out, “Mama, Mama” as he lay grasping for breath and dying, but Larcenia Floyd had been dead for two years.

You shouldn’t have to cry in heaven.

Tsitsi Wakhisi teaches journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

This story was originally published February 20, 2022 at 6:00 AM.