The conversation between pro athletes and their families has a new urgency.
The red and blue lights blinked atop a police car as it careened past a corner in the middle of North Philadelphia on a sweltering June weekday. In the front seat of a halted luxury Porsche sedan was top-10 ranked heavyweight Bryant "BY-BY" Jennings. This wasn’t the first time Philly cops stopped his ride. By now he knows the routine. And so does his son.
Mason was in the back seat of the cruiser parked on 30th Street and Diamond Avenue. Jennings’ car windows, given that it’s a luxury vehicle, come with a slight tint. According to Jennings, the officer came to the driver’s side. As the 31-year-old boxer was being reprimanded, Mason voiced his confusion.
"Dad, everyone has tint. What about that car right there? He gonna pull him over? He’s got tint, too." Mason asked as another beamer whizzed past. All Jennings could say is "yeah, I know son, but that’s just what (police) do."
This hadn’t been the first time Jennings’ son has seen him get pulled over, unjustly as he describes it, by police officers. Because of that, at just 7 years old, Mason has already heard facets of "The Talk" from his dad.
"The Talk" is as ingrained into the maturation of black children as blue is to the sky. It’s when black parents tell their kids how to interact with a white country in public. They specifically detail how they should behave when stopped by law enforcement.
For black parents, in a country where police disproportionately kill more black people than anyone else, "The Talk" is about quelling the learned, cognitive fear of being black in America. "The Talk" is about doing everything possible to keep your child alive.
"It’s a talk," Jennings told SB Nation. "All day everyday. He’s not even tired of it. I make him see why. I give him examples. I give him reasons why, so that he understands ... he sees what the consequences are. A lot of these things are common sense (for black people)."
But like most parents of black children, "The Talk" is merely a tool. It doesn’t stop all the trepidation of being a black parent in America.
"I’m afraid of raising him in this era, period," Jennings said.
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For black parents, this is the conversation, or talk, you have with your children even before the one about sex.
The rhetoric is straightforward: keep your hands where police can see them, place them on the wheel, don’t make any sudden movements, be respectful even if they aren’t, remove anything about your character that plays into their bias.
"The Talk" is a salient tool for black parents to make black children aware of how officers may see them. Yet, with the recent shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, media outlets have taken the news and treated this element of black culture with naivety that reflects a majority culture perspective.
ABC News ran a segment discussing how the deaths of Castile and Sterling "sparked" these conversations in black households and showed how white families in Dallas didn’t do the same. To non-black audiences, this may appear to be a new tenet of what they might not have known about black maturation. This is a newness that might also be dissimilar to their own teachings. But to black families, including the families of black athletes, this strategy is as old as time.
"In earlier periods, you literally had to teach (black) people the consequences of walking down the sidewalk and looking at white people in the face, of looking at a white woman, of letting white people know you can read and write," Noliwe Rooks, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Cornell who studies racial inequality, told SB Nation.
"Today, the things we know, is that one of the features of black culture is that somehow you have to tell your children that the police may not be your friend," Rooks continued. "You will not get the benefit of the doubt. And if you move too fast, look too hard or don’t comply, you will most certainly bring down the power of the state and violence down on your head."
It’s a paradigm that has been documented for decades. Author Richard Wright published Black Boy in 1945, a memoir depicting his time in the Jim Crow South and eventual move to Chicago.
Wright mentioned that when he was a delivery boy he would "watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what was said and what was left unsaid."
Late one Saturday night I made some deliveries in a white neighborhood. I was pedaling my bicycle back to the store as fast as I could when a police car, swerving toward me, jammed me into the curbing. "Get down, nigger, and put up your hands!" they ordered. I did. They climbed out of the car, guns drawn, faces set, and advanced slowly. "Keep still!" they ordered. I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and packages. They seemed dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating. Finally, one of them said: "Boy, tell your boss not to send you out in white neighborhoods at this time of night."
Those insidious effects of racism were further examined in the last section of Jonathan Lethem’s book The Fortress of Solitude, published in 2003. Lethem poked at a nuance of a white protagonist being obsessed with "sad black folks" through music and shows the desperate state of blackness compared to whiteness.
This was reflected in white artists using a black sound in music, multiple black people on the protagonist's block being in jail and the most striking question of the section being asked by Lethem through the protagonist's voice: "what age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?" — a question that retains its relevance every time police kill black people in the United States.
It’s these feelings that lead many black athletes to believe "The Talk" or some form of it is just as necessary now as ever. Essence Bembry, the mother of DeAndré Bembry — a former standout forward at Saint Joseph’s University who was a first-round draft pick of the Atlanta Hawks — instilled that lesson in her son.
Her son went to college in Philadelphia, the site of the Brandon Tate-Brown shooting in December 2014 where police shot the 26-year-old in the back of the head because they thought he had a gun. A place that -- like many cities — erupted in protest after Castile and Sterling were killed earlier this month.
Essence and DeAndré would sit up all night having these conversations, DeAndré doing most of the listening and absorbing. She remembered how when he was a teenager, someone close to her told her that her quiet but huge (he’s 6’6) son seemed standoffish in public settings. His combination of size and demeanor could make him seem threatening to people who didn’t know him.
Essence told DeAndré to make sure he smiled more and encouraged him to get over his shyness. She told him to make sure he spoke cheerily to people who made eye contact with him, whether those interactions were with police or anyone else. Now as an NBA pro, the culmination of a lifetime dream, Bembry is teammates with Thabo Sefolosha, the Hawks swingman who is currently suing the NYPD for $50 million for breaking his leg through the alleged use of excessive force in 2015. Despite all of Essence’s advice to DeAndre’, she still worries that her millionaire son might be in danger.
"I’m scared myself as a black woman. Now, I have a son as a professional athlete and I feel like they’re targeted as well," she told SB Nation. "If you notice, you see white men attacking police officers and they just tackle them. If we ever, If a black man ever attacks a white cop, he’s dead. He’s dead without even moving. He’s dead for reaching for a license."
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NBA Hall of Famer Tom "Satch" Sanders detailed to SB Nation in May how back in the 1960s police pulled guns on him and former Boston Celtics players in Los Angeles as they walked through the city before a game. Recent news seems proof that the relationship between black people and police hasn’t progressed much since Sanders’ time.
Contemporary police-community relations has made Xavier Silas, a professional basketball player who just finished a stint on the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Summer League team, question a lot about the country. He’s had "The Talk" with his father, San Antonio Spurs legend James Silas. many times. Together they run a non-profit in partnership with the Austin Police Department called Austin Midnight Basketball that works with at-risk kids of color. On Friday nights, instead of being out on the street during "prime crime hours," local youth are in a gym playing basketball.
Xavier Silas is bringing a son into the world in November. He’s readying himself to give the same talk his father gave him and that they jointly give to campers in Texas. Until the nation progresses, he said, black people have to continue to have open forms of communication like this because their interactions with police will never be the same as those of their white counterparts.
"You have to be extra careful as a black man, because people are nervous already. That’s something you just have to understand. It’s not fair. It’s not equal to everyone else," he said. "But that’s what you have to tell your kids. You can’t tell them everything is equal and the same because it’s not. That’s clear."
In a country that shoots black people down every 28 hours, that are killed by officers twice as much as white Americans, it’s come to the point where many researches have agreed that racism plays a role in the disparities between black deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
But given the increased spotlight on these shootings, it opens up an opportunity for figures in sports and pop culture to speak out. Rooks, the Cornell professor, said at this moment in history black people are using their voices everywhere, including the avenue of sport. Which has the potential to change a moment into a continuation of a movement.
Milwaukee Bucks forward Jabari Parker expressed that sentiment last week on his personal Instagram account.
First and foremost, I'm black. Secondly, I stand up for my black people. I will not stop fighting for equality because this will effect my kids one day and my friends' children. I want the world and our society to make a playing field that's both safe and fair to make it out of the worst situations. Even though my (economical and living circumstances) struggle made me the person I am, it has also ripped up so many of my peers. Lastly, I support BLACK LIVES MATTER. I don't care what anybody tells me what I should and should not say. At the end of the day, I speak from my heart and I could care less trying to impress someone. BLM does not mean black lives are superior, just means we 'matter' too. Especially seeing blacks so favorable and more likely to experience police brutality and incarceration throughout these recent months. We have created an unhealthy way of living through many false stereotypes from the way someone looks. It just so happens that these false stereotypes create negative fields in which people are afraid to interact with someone just off the color of their skin. I hope we can all support each other regardless of your political background, religion, or skin color. Cuz don't we all bleed the same color.....?
A photo posted by Jabari Parker (@jabariparker) on
Jul 12, 2016 at 10:22am PDT
Like many other athletes, Parker and others have plenty to say about police brutality. In this moment, when ballers, boxers, sprinters and the like are calling for reformative change in the country, Americans have to do less silencing and more listening. Then maybe black parents will finally be able to do less talking.