A teaching moment on driving while brown
*An all too real and needed lesson for young Latinos: you will be considered a suspect. VL
By Jessica O’Dwyer, Marin News
Last Sunday evening, as I swept the kitchen floor and loaded the dishwasher, my 9-year-old son Mateo cavorted around the room, telling me about his day. My sister and her family were visiting from Boston, and we — my sister, her girls, my daughter, and I — had gone into San Francisco to shop while Mateo stayed home with my husband, to do, as my husband calls it, “guy stuff.”
After a report on fixing the drip irrigation system, Mateo regaled me with tales of their trip to the hardware store, where they bought lumber to build a rack in our basement, and stopped at the food truck to indulge their shared passion for giant hot dogs smothered in onions and ketchup.
“When Dad and I were driving home,” Mateo said, “we saw seven police cars parked on the side of the road, and a Latino man standing next to a shiny, fancy car with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. Dad said maybe the police thought the Latino man committed a crime.”
“Oh?” I said with surprise. I hadn’t expected an account of a roadside arrest to be wedged in among Mateo’s anecdotes about searching for the right 2-by-4 and the hot dog he’d ordered from the food truck.
“Dad told me that when I’m 20, you might give me a car, and if a Latino man commits a crime, and I’m driving my car, the police will see me and might think I’m the Latino man who committed the crime.”
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[Photo by grendelkhan/Flickr]