Jaci Dawn

This is not my story. It is my son’s story. I will try to respect his boundaries and tell his story from my perspective. I will leave out key details that are his to tell.

We homeschooled. I pulled the kids out of public school when “Goals 2000” was being implemented. I had an educational disagreement to the bill, the movement, and the theory. I read the entire bill. I was active on all the boards. I was vocal.

And I lost. Goals 2000 and “No Child Left behind” became law. Those laws have morphed into the current educational philosophy that I continue to disagree with. We are failing our children, but that is a rant for another time.

This is the story of how we got where we are. How we studied history. The movies, the races, the marginalized.

I think it was mostly accidental that we studied the Civil Rights Movement and watched movies about the 1960’s from the African American point of view. The church we attended was multiracial. The only time our kids were exposed to blatant racism was in the presence of certain relatives who also exposed the kids to all the swear words I unlearned in order to raise children.

The mother of some of my grandchildren came into our lives in 2008. She was from Bakersfield, California, a bi-racial beauty with a radiant smile. They produced three beautiful children during their brief period of marriage. When the marriage dissolved, our son became the custodian of those children. The father. Mom has secondary rights, visitation rights. Dad has the kids most of the year.

He has remarried. He has more children with his second wife. His second wife has taken on those three kids as her very own. His second wife is as white as my (our) heritage. The three kids from that first marriage range in skin color from light brown to very brown. They are African American children. Bi-racial children.

And we have these riots. We have murdered Black men and women. The year is 2020. It’s not 1968 or 1974. It is fucking 2020.

All Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter. Got that. My family – and my daughter-in-law’s family – are law enforcement. Blue Lives Matter.

But Black Lives. My grandsons. They will be teenagers only too soon. They might have attitude. No more attitude than their father did when harassed by police in the City of Gresham as a white BMX rider. But they are NOT white. The actions of their father reflected in their behavior could lead to their deaths. My son was white and rebellious. The most he might have gotten was a ticket.

His children could be murdered.

The middle son, especially, is a reflection of his father at the same age. I’ve seen that rebellious chin turn up. But the difference is the color of their skin.

This Has To End. It should have ended before 1970. It should have ended before Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. It should have ended when my family fought in the American Civil War on the side of the Union. It should have ended before the City of Tulsa eliminated half the population. It should have ended when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Ford.

Red. Black. Yellow. Brown. White. We all bleed the same ABO blood.

Rainbow bleeds the same ABO.

#fuckracism

(I may not have edited this to suit the political climate)