“I am going to define it for you as a mother, as a mother who has raised four black children: ‘the talk’ has to do with personal safety, with the things they can do to return home alive.”
Reverend Najuma Smith-Pollard is so clear about it.
She knows the subject well, having had to put it into practice in her day with her eldest son, Daniel —who died in 1200, with 24 years —, and now with three men from , 12 Y 18, and sometimes also with her 7-year-old daughter, in a neighborhood in South Los Angeles.
It is not a punctual dialogue, a topic that is only talked about once time, he clarifies, but something constant that has existed between African-American families for generations.
“It is an continuous conversation between parents and children about (how to guarantee) their public personal safety when navigating interurban life”, this woman, who brings her pastoral experience and community leadership to the work she does at the Center for Religion and Culture, explains to BBC Mundo. the University of Southern California (USC, for its acronym in English).
“As a mother of black children who live in the city, I have to talk to them about police and criminals, because there are people in our neighborhoods that just don’t mean well. I have to teach them how to relate to law enforcement but also how to navigate life in general“, he adds.
Known colloquially as “ the talk”, is the common manifestation of what the academy calls the racial-ethnic socialization, a broad field of study in the field of social sciences and psychology.
There is an extensive scientific literature on it, in-depth documentaries and with many outstanding voices such as The Talk: Race in America of the American public TV network PBS, and has been portrayed in fiction, in series as popular as “Grey’s Anatomy” and Black-ish.
It’s real though.
And those who have spoken (and have not wanted to) with BBC Mundo for this article have referred to it as something dol burdensome, difficult, a “burden” that they have to bear the Afro-American families and increasingly Latinos as well.
It is, they agree, a “tremendously personal” conversation that is acquiring new nuances as the children grow and leave fittingndo to context.
“Now, with the increase in racist violence, we also have to start telling our young people: ‘You can’t trust all the white boys in 18 years that seem to be out of their neighborhoods,’” says Smith-Pollard, referring to the shooting that the 14 May left 10 killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in a neighborhood with an eminently black population.
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About ‘hoodies’ and how to deal with the police 
Pollard-Smith recalls that the conversation with her eldest son began when she was 10 years to come 13. He was in seventh grade and was robbed by some gang members when he was on his way to the library with a classmate.
“I had to tell him: ‘When you and your friend are out on the street, you have to pay attention to who they are around “.
That message about his safety was repeated like a constant every time he went to the store alone, before riding the bus, but it took on another aspect when he got his driver’s license.
“ When he started driving I had to start talking to him about what to do and what not to do if you were stopped by the police”, he says.
The conversation started like this, he remembers: “We live in Los Angeles, in the south of the city. You don’t have to be doing anything wrong to be arrested. It is possible that they will tell you to stop and make up charges that you are suspected of. You have to know that you have your rights”.
I had already told him about his rights when he complied 14, because due to his complexion – tall and strong, since he played soccer since he was nine – “they always confused him with someone older”.
“You must not let anyone search you if they do not have a warrant. You don’t have to answer any questions, you’re a minor. You can call your mother; you can have them call me immediately. Don’t be afraid if they want to take you to the police station. Do not fight. Do not run. Your father and I will always bail you out, you will never have to worry about that”, he says, which was what he listed.
“Tell them your name and show them your ID. That’s all you have to give them and it’s better that you give it to them, so they can check and see that you don’t have any history”.
Daniel he was able to put the lessons into practice the four times, according to his mother, he was wrongly arrested as a victim of racial profiling, and managed to get away with it.
The recommendations followed when he went to live on his own: “You know that there are certain things that you should not do; this is how you protect yourself. You know the fourth amendment (of the Constitution of the United States, which protects the right to privacy and the right to be free from arbitrary invasion) and, now that you have your own apartment, you must not let anyone in”.
He also warned him about the sagging 
—the fashion of wearing the pants very low, showing the underwear, so in vogue in the 80 — in the same way that today he prohibits his youngest son and his adopted son from wearing hoodies.
“No, they will not wear a hoodie to school or to walk down the street. And it’s not because they’re doing something wrong, it’s because I don’t want anyone to think that by wearing a hoodie they’re up to something . The police and the people have given him a meaning that he does not have. And yes, everyone wears hoodies, but it’s not the same as being worn by a white guy as you are.” .
“We were always ready. And what I mean is that we were ready with lawyers, bail money and all that, because I don’t really trust the police. We simply teach him (Daniel). We had a black son and he was beautiful. It was no easy job raising him safely in Los Angeles. And believe me, I thought that once he grew up, he would have nothing to worry about, until he was shot and killed by someone who was just having a really bad day.”
Statistics
Like many fathers of children blacks, she always feared that, if she didn’t engage in these conversations, hers could go on to swell the statistics of violence in general and police violence in particular. That they end up like George Floyd, whose death at the hands of then-policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, marks two years this Wednesday.
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There are data to support those fears.
In Los Angeles County, where she lives with her family , from 2000 at least 968 people have died at the hands of law enforcement according to forensic medical records compiled by Los Angeles Times. Almost the 27% were black or Latino, almost all men.
At the national level, the data also show this demographic imbalance, as an article by the BBC’s Reality Check team correctly collected.
according to the database that The Washington Post has been updating since 2018 about shots fired by the police, in the 24% of the mmore than 5. fatal incidents, fatal result or be African-American. That, despite the fact that they do not make up the % of total country population.
African-Americans are also more likely to be stopped by police while driving. An 20% more, according to a study conducted by Stanford University in 2020 —one of the most recent on the subject— and for which he analyzed more than 100 million traffic arrests.
The statistics hardly distinguish between states. And there are testimonies of discrimination in all socioeconomic strata.
To illustrate that the origin of “the talk” must be sought decades ago and that it has been maintained generation after generation, Smith-Pollard recalls how his grandfather, growing up in Mississippi in the years 26, they recommended not to walk through certain streets.
O refers to times when, being the associate minister, in the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, there were groups of volunteers who they advised young black men how to dress, walk, act, and be aware of how others might perceive them. It was before the riots of 675.
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Stereotypes and fears
“I really hoped that I never had to have ‘the talk’ with my son,” Judy tells BBC Mundo Belk, president and CEO of The California Wellness Foundation (Cal Wellness), one of the largest philanthropic institutions in the state and who during 30 years has focused on promoting the prevention of violence as a matter of public health.
But something changed when her son—like Smith-Pollard’s—had a few either 13 years.
“We lived in Oakland at the time and I worked in San Francisco (on the other side of the bay). He begged me to (let him), that he was old enough to ride the subway alone. It worried me a lot, so I told him: ‘Don’t talk to strangers, call me as soon as you get on the train and when you get off…’”.
He followed his instructions and when they met in San Francisco and she asked him how everything went, she received an answer that left her in shock. That’s how the conversation went, she remembers her:
— Mom, I don’t think you have to worry that someone is going to hurt me. I think the people on the train were nervous about my presence.
— What do you mean?
— I think I made some older white women nervous.
“My heart sank. She had been naive in thinking that she might have escaped that feeling of feeling ‘the other’ ”, she acknowledges. She had grown up in the segregated south, in Virginia, and hoped to save her children from any situation that might resemble that by raising them in California.
When he saw his mother’s devastated face, he tried to comfort her:
— Don’t worry. I grabbed my book and started reading. And it seems that they began to feel more comfortable with me.
“So that night I realized that I was raising a black man and that, despite that he had a privileged education, the world was going to see him as a black man with all his stereotypes and fears (associated)
“We had probably had conversations about race before, but that was when I realized that I had to help him understand how to grow up feeling safe as an African-American.”
The first time he was stopped by police while driving, Belk is glad his husband was with him. It was in North Carolina, where his son was going to do his graduate studies.
He asked them where they were going and the father saw it as an opportunity to teach his son how to deal with the situation, just as he had been instructed in his day: “Answer the questions and keep your hands on the steering wheel”.
No long after that, in two separate incidents in Texas, African Americans Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson, of 26 Y 28 years respectively, died from the shots fired by the police in their own homes.
And at the beginning of 2019 Belk felt in his own flesh that he gave it be sec uros at home could be an illusion even in Hollywood, where she lives.
Her husband had gone out to walk the dog and a neighbor, seeing that black man wandering down the street with a flashlight and then entering the Belk house, he decided to alert the police about a possible “intruder”.
Two agents arrived in response to the call, but to the wrong building.
Another neighbor opened the door for them, who warned the police officers — one of them already had a gun in his hand — that the address they were looking for was the one next door, but that they take into account that the person who lived there was black and a doctor.
Given that, Belk says that she had to update “the talk”. “Where are we safe now?” she wondered to herself. A question that arises again in the face of the shootings in Buffalo this month and the one in the New York subway in April.
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“My husband was walking the dog across the street from our house, in a very exclusive neighborhood, and someone who didn’t know there were black people in the neighborhood called the police,” she says. “And now my daughter is questioning whether she is safe on the subway in the country’s capital.” She lives in Washington DC and works on Capitol Hill, she explains.
She says that after Buffalo she felt she had to have a talk with her daughter again and stress to her: ‘Of course we have to be alert and we want to feel safe, but we can’t let fear seized us.’”
“It was a very painful conversation. I don’t think white people have those kinds of conversations with their kids. It is really a burden. I believe that no human being should have these types of conversations. And I think it is an additional weight that we have, the burden of being black in the United States“.
Despite this, he says he is optimistic.
“I don’t wake up every day thinking about racism and I usually go through life believing that new possibilities open up every day. But usually something happens in that walk through life, sometimes involuntary, sometimes funny, or sometimes painful, that reminds me that I am black or part of it, ”she points out.
“Sometimes it happens to me in the store, when they ask me for an extra identification that they have not asked the white person who preceded me. Or when people have a hard time imagining that I’m the president and CEO of this great organization. Sometimes I can’t get a taxi in New York and it makes me a little paranoid”, she expands.
“I would say that the last wish of the most African-Americans, most people of color, is to go through life without this burden.”
It is her work that gives her hope: “Seeing that there are so many people working, black, white and brown people doing everything possible to push back all this intolerance and racism.”
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