All of it? I ask.
All of it, he says.

White friends are reaching out, concerned. It’s events like this that make them reach out, but it’s a rare white friend who reaches out on an everyday level or wants to talk about race.

Barricades are being torn down at The White House.

I want to keep my black son in lockdown. In his room, with the door closed. Play as many video games as you like. Don’t come out, I’ll bring you a box of donuts. With colored sprinkles and chocolate icing. Five boxes of donuts. Ten boxes of donuts. Peach cobbler ice cream from the Cajun restaurant down the street. I like knowing where he is. I like knowing he won’t be mistaken for anyone other than himself, Gabriel, a very special human being. With his mix of hair and skin and limbs that could be from Ethiopia, from Israel, from Eastern Europe.

The pandemic is outside, the sickness of America.

When Obama was running for office for the first time, and Gabriel was five, white fathers would come and high five him and say hey, we’ll have the first black president. Gabriel was confused, and would say, but I’m not black, I’m brown. In first and second grade, when he went to a school that was largely black and brown, he learned to define himself as black, that black didn’t literally mean his skin color but it meant something else. But then he went to visit his father’s African family in Fredericksburg, VA, and they attended the Ghanaian church, and the kids said to him what are you doing here because this is a black church and you’re not black.

But you are Gabriel, I tell him.

He’s a kid sitting in his room playing Modern Warfare.

He’s a teenager putting colleges on his list.

He baked cornbread yesterday.

He’s a kid who lovingly pets our Rottweiler-Sharpei mix. Pet her here, mom, she really likes it here, he tells me as Roxy vibrates her hind leg in excitement. That spot.

He used to play in the streets of Venice with his white blond friend. They would carry water guns and shoot them at each other. Once when his dad visited he brought him a giant machine gun replica. I struggled with keeping it, almost threw it out several times, but then I would think a rare gift from a father was important and let it stay. It sat unused and hidden for several years, and then suddenly he found it and liked it again. Then I had to say, as he was growing older, Gabriel you cannot play with guns in the streets of Venice anymore, maybe in a backyard you can.

He nodded. He understood.

And when he was twelve and we were parked in front of the corner store and we had Roxy in the car and he didn’t want us to both go in and leave the dog alone, because she hated being alone, and he said oh I can go in and look at the drinks and see what I want and then come back and tell you what I want and then you can go in and buy it. And I said okay. And then he paused, thinking about it, scrunching up his face, and looking at the store, not at me, said you know I better not because they’ll just think I’m a black kid trying to steal.

He gets straight A’s. He’s the captain of his water polo team. He pushed his great-uncle Ottie in a wheelchair. His lithe little body pushing two hundred eighty pounds of Philadelphia uncle through the plaza, that time in Santa Fe.

Does it matter?

I asked him tonight if we should go protest, that there are protests in Downtown LA, and he said no mom I don’t think so. I am secretly happy he wants to stay in his room.

I heard him tell his childhood friend, the blond kid from Venice, that he was his white ally.

Yesterday he called me into his room to show me a black CNN reporter being arrested on live television, as the reporting continued, rows of riot police lined up in the background, in the streets of Minneapolis. The Fifth Precinct on fire, the fire department letting it burn. The bus drivers won’t drive arrested protesters to prison.

We were on lockdown and my son couldn’t do his usual activities, swim team and water polo club. So he decided to start jogging, like a lot of his teammates. He put on a mask and his running shoes and for days jogged in our neighborhood, past the India Sweets Shop and back. And then he heard about Ahmaud Aubery, and that evening when he was about to go out jogging, I asked him how he felt and he said, nervous.

This week he told me he wasn’t going to jog anymore because it was hurting his knees.

All of it.

What do I tell my concerned white friends? What do I say to black friends and family? To my foreign friends? This is our country now? Looting, shooting? “Good people on both sides”? The look of pure sadism in Derek Chauvin’s eyes, his hand in his pocket. Floyd and Chauvin worked security at the same nightclub at some point. The El Nuevo Rodeo Club on Lake Street.

A suspected counterfeit twenty dollar bill. I knew a white hipster in San Francisco who had gotten a roll of counterfeit twenties from Eastern European connections. I was meeting him in Precita Park one day and he came out of the corner store there and laughed, and said I just used a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Weren’t you scared to get caught? I asked him. To him it was fun and almost glamorous, a foot into international crime. He walked out and they didn’t check that twenty, he never got caught and he laughed about it and then he went to law school.

George Floyd called out, mama.

And then, I’m through.

I want this lockdown to go on and on. I want my black son in his room, ten feet from me as I work on my computer. Gabriel in his room. He’s in there as I write this. I hear him laughing with online friends. They play a video game together. They are shooting but it’s not real.

There are protests in this city, and in many cities across this sometimes great, often terrible country.
I want to keep him home. I want to keep him Gabriel. I want him to keep his heart. I want him not to suspect that his life is valued less. I want him to be around love. The dog is curled up on her chair outside his room, also guarding him. Safe, inside, where he is a beloved son, where his mama can feel like she can keep him safe.

 

Making media more social since 1995, Shara Karasic, now living in CA, is co-founder CoderDojo LA and self-proclaimed sometimes writer.