In a blog entry at Tortured by Teenagers, Gina Carroll relates personal stories about her teenagers being harassed by the police on the way home in their affluent community, which makes it hard for her to write about the Trayvon Martin case. She says that it hits a little too close to home.
I can’t write about the untimely and unseemly death of this young African-American man. I am, after all, the mother of two African-American boys — boys who, like Trayvon Martin, love basketball and lemonade and Skittles. Boys who wear hoodies when it’s cold; wear hoodies when it’s not; wear hoodies because hoodies are cool. Boys who frequent gated and affluent communities. Boys who are often on foot.
I can’t write about this because it hits too close to home. Two months ago my oldest son was stopped by the Bellaire, Texas police while walking to work. He was searched while bent over the hood of a police car and at gunpoint, asked why he was where he was. And then he was told that his hair and his clothes resembled those of a robbery suspect ( the fact of that report no one could verify for us). My son was advised to go back to his home in River Oaks.
Last year my daughter was stopped by a neighborhood patrolman. He asked her why she was in the neighborhood and was told that she was stopped because she had something suspicious in her hand. He thought it might be a rifle. That “rifle” was her lacrosse stick. She was a block from school and returning home from her school team practice. She was wearing her training clothes with her school logo on them. She had a back pack on her back. She is all of five foot four, one hundred and fifteen pounds.
Read Gina Carroll's entire blog entry at Tortured by Teenager.