“Mommy, what does ‘arrested’ mean?”
“It’s when you do something bad and the police take you away.”
“Where do they take you?”
“To the police station.”
“Where they kill you?”
“NO! No, they don’t kill you, honey. No.”
“Where they wrestle you?”
Erika Carney Haub's musings on life and God from South Central, L.A.
“Mommy, what does ‘arrested’ mean?”
“It’s when you do something bad and the police take you away.”
“Where do they take you?”
“To the police station.”
“Where they kill you?”
“NO! No, they don’t kill you, honey. No.”
“Where they wrestle you?”
Wow, what a great series of questions.
“Where they wrestle you?”
“No… of course not. Unless you’re Rodney King. Or they think you have a weapon. Or you’re an African-American male and you said something vaguely aggressive. Okay, sure… fine. They wrestle you.”
That would’ve been my response.
Maybe it’s good that I don’t have children yet.
Yes, Jelani, I had the exact same thoughts. And Sunday at our worship service she heard a young man in our congregation give exactly that testimony: God delivering him from LAPD custody (totally wrongfully detained), after getting jumped/tackled/wrestled to the ground and thrown into the back of a cruiser.
So as black and white (no pun intended) as I tend to paint her world at this age, the gray is not lost on her, I’m sure.