I wrote last night about a rally in City Heights… I didn’t find a way to include something a ten or eleven-year-old boy said. I didn’t include it because I didn’t know what to say about it… I didn’t know what to think about it. I hadn’t processed it yet. Here’s the way it happened.  All the people on the platform were African American.  The crowd was mixed… fewer whites and Asians than African Americans and Latinos.  The guy on the platform handed the microphone around to others standing with him.  Mostly what was said by the adults was predictable, pretty much what I expected to hear as expressions of solidarity with people protesting in other cities… nothing original… mostly about keeping the movement going… That’s when the little boy motioned to the guy with the microphone that he wanted to say something.  He said two, maybe three sentences.  The part that stuck in my head, “the evil white men who are killing us…” The rally leader took back the mike and said quickly that the rally wasn’t about color or race, that we are all in this together.  I don’t remember the other words… just “the evil white men who are killing us.”  

Now I think I understand.  Whether it’s literally true or not, it’s the perception of a little boy about the way the world works.  That’s the way he sees it, so that’ the way it is for him.  I’m guessing that’s the way it might have been for Michael Brown when he was eight and ten and fourteen and probably the day he was killed when he was eighteen. 

 Officer Darren Wilson is only ten years older than Michael Brown was on the day he was shot. I wonder what Officer Wilson was thinking when he was ten years old about how the world works?