Retired New York Police Department Detective Harry Houck owes black children an apology.
In the aftermath of the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers, Houck said that black children are prone to criminality. That was said in the same week that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that the Black Lives Matter movement is inherently racist.
Houck's statement is not just his own belief; many white people believe the same and that is part of the reason police violence against black people is tolerated, accepted and excused. It is also one of the reasons for the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
From the beginning of our history as a nation, there has been no regard or respect for black lives. In the United States Constitution, black people were fractionalized - i.e., they were decided to be only 3/5 of a human being. During slavery, black people worked from sun-up to sun-down, making the economy of the South what it was and what it would become. After the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, the system of convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private entities, including plantation and former plantation owners and corporations. Under this system, black people were indiscriminately arrested for minor, non-violent crimes and sentenced to work for white people - usually for the rest of their lives. In the famous Dred Scott decision, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney had the temerity to write that there were "no rights of a black man that a white man was bound to respect." When the Brown v Board of Education case rendered "separate but equal" to be unconstitutional, white people disobeyed the law for years, some school districts choosing to close schools rather than integrate them. Black schools were given the worst supplies, the worst teachers; the physical facilities were inhumane, in the North and the South. Some schools attended by black children in the North had no heat in the winter and no air conditioning in the summer. In the South, black children could not even go to school during some parts of the year because they had to be available to work in the fields.
Black people were punished, sometimes killed, for learning to read and write; the white power structure made the same illegal. Black people were deemed to be the lowest rungs of humanity, even as white people clung to black people for their labor skills.
And through it all, black people held on and continued to push for justice and rights as American citizens.
The criminalization of black people, coupled with white supremacy and its belief that black people are inherently inferior to white people has caused a multitude of problems. There has never been justice for black people in the criminal justice system. How can it be just when history shows that black people were accused over and over of crimes the "justice system"knew they had not committed, and were yet convicted - normally by all-white juries - and then sentenced to life in prison or many times, death? There developed a spirit of haughtiness among white people here, believing the lie that black people were inherently criminal. Law enforcement officers historically took part in the hunt-down, beatings, and killings of black people, many times without a trial. They did not protect black people; they helped to kill them. When George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin - which really ignited the Black Lives Matter movement, it is probable that he did not worry about being convicted because the history in this nation is that black people killed by whites (or those who think they are white) deserved their fate.
It is in this toxic reality that black children live. They are not free. They cannot play with toy guns; they cannot do the mischievous things that all kids normally do. They are taught to talk with lowered voices, to respect (and fear) police officers. I have seen white kids in resorts acting like kids do - being rude and loud and ...just kids, while at the same resort, black kids are told to sit still and be quiet. Black children are not free.
Harry Houck doesn't have a clue.
If black kids in poor neighborhoods commit crimes it is because they have nothing else to do. Any idle kid, no matter his/her race or ethnicity, will get into trouble if left to their own devices. It's part of being a kid. Too often, in poor black neighborhoods, parents are working so they can stay in their homes and apartments and do not have the money to send their children to camps or places where there is good child care. The kids run free and they get into trouble.
But they are not "prone to criminality." They are "prone" to being kids. Period
As the kids grow up and see how their schools are lacking as compared to white schools nearby, as they see how their friends are arrested for crimes that their white friends get away with, as they get rejection after rejection for jobs for which they apply, they get angry. They do not understand what is wrong, why they are treated so differently.
If there is anything black children are prone to, it is a feeling of unworthiness, a feeling of inferiority, the pain of being rejected, and anger at all of the above.
Unless and until Harry Houck and others who make these pronouncements about black kids come into our communities and see, taste, feel what goes on there with these little ones whose eyes show hopelessness by the time they are in the third grade, he should be quiet.
And he should apologize to our children for his insensitive, incorrect and racist remark.