The power of white innocence — why my father was never a hashtag

I was taught how to unbuckle my seatbelt by a police officer fishing me out of my father’s car after his partner had just slapped the cuffs on my daddy. He leaned over my car seat smiling, pity behind his eyes, as he told me, “You just push this red button. If you even need to get out you push the red button.” I shoved my chubby toddler finger down hard on the button and watched the strap across my chest release. And then this man in blue who I’d never met, with a gun on his hip that I couldn’t stop staring at, pulled me out of my car seat and handed me a teddy bear, which my mother would later make me give back, saying, “we don’t need a souvenir from this day.”

I would get placed in the back of the squad car next to my father, pressing myself into the side of his body, inhaling the familiar smell of cigarettes and yesterday’s booze. We would wait like that for over an hour. The police went to what I now understand to be unprecedented lengths not to call Child Protective Services, instead dispatching an officer to physically track down my mother at her workplace (in the pre-smart phone world).

As we waited for her, I sat holding that damn teddy bear and fingering the metal cuffs behind my dad’s back until the officers told me to stop. I wondered if they hurt. My mother would arrive and immediately light into my father, cussing him out at the top of her lungs while standing the middle of the street as the officer told her in a classic cop-talking-to-a-white-woman tone to “please calm down, ma’am.” 

Twenty years later, I would think back on this event from toddlerdom in the wake of officer Rusten Sheskey of the Kenosha police putting seven bullets into Jacob Blake’s body at point blank range, while his babies watched from the back seat of the car. On Jan. 6, 2021, when we learned that Sheskey would not be charged, the very same day a white supremacist mob stormed the nation’s capital, I knew the piece sitting in the pit of my stomach since August had to come onto the page.

I don’t claim any hot take, or expertise. There are far more qualified, knowledgeable voices who have and will continue to advance the conversation about race and policing in this country. At the risk of centering my own white story, I write this piece to offer yet another personal narrative as further evidence for other white folks who may still question that policing is racist and white privilege is real.  

As is usually the case when a Black man is murdered by a police officer, the media and those who wish to remain in the denial whiteness affords go sniffing for justification of the violence. The victim gets painted as a thug, deviant, criminal — the list goes on. In the case of Jacob Blake, who survived but will remain paralyzed, there was a warrant out for his arrest. This, along with other claims about his criminal record, would get put on blast as justification for seven bullets in the back.

I know without a shadow of a doubt that under the same circumstances, a white father with his babies in the car would have escaped the interaction without violence. Because my father did. And he is a convicted felon.

My father did 18 years in prison prior to my birth for a violent crime. On the day I learned how to unbuckle my seatbelt, there was a warrant out for his arrest. We were pulled over initially because the tabs were out of date, but the minute they ran the plates not only did the outstanding warrant come up, but also his entire criminal history, which is enough to make anyone nervous.

However, the officers did not seem to “fear for their lives” as they so often claim they do when interacting with unarmed Black men (not to mention children and teens). No, instead they were most concerned with me: white, doll-faced, with a head of blond ringlets, and blue eyes, the picture of white girlhood. 

Jacob Blake may have had a warrant, but he was not a convicted felon. He had no violent crime convictions of any kind on his record at that date, yet he got seven bullets with his kids watching from the back seat. And before you say “well yeah, but Blake resisted,” stop. Blake is a Black man who was afraid of “becoming the next George Floyd,” as he put it to “Good Morning America.” He was in fight-or-flight mode. His fear is justified not only by the events of that summer, or the last 15 years of camera phone footage, but 500 years of white terror. Meanwhile, we’ve seen police arrest heavily armed white male school shooters without leaving a scratch. 

Officer Friendly-Help-You-With-Your-Seatbelt and partner could arrest my father — a convicted felon with a history of violent crime — with very little fanfare. They could spend well over an hour tracking down and waiting for my mother, to avoid my having to spend several hours in the custody of Child Protective Services, all to limit my trauma. An “innocent” little girl who reminded them of their own daughters and nieces. I was treated with kid gloves, and due to my presence on this occasion, so was my father.

Sheskey did not think about the wellbeing and innocence of Blake’s children as he unloaded seven bullets into their father’s body. He did not see his relations in them. He did not see them as innocent. He did not see them. They deserve to be seen. Their innocence, their childhood, and their lives matter. 

If the argument held true that “the police were just doing their job, and they would have done the same if he were a white man with a warrant and a record,” my story would be very different. The minute the cops saw my father’s record come up they would have assumed him armed, been afraid for their lives and approached the car guns out. I very well may have watched him die that day from my car seat. But his white privilege and my white childhood protected us both, felony status and all. 

And that right there is the difference. I share this to illustrate one more time that the actions, record or warrant for Blake or any other Black or brown man in his position, is not a justification. It absolutely is about race. 

Though this encounter was about as gentle as an interaction with the police gets, it was still one of the more traumatic events of my upbringing. After Sheskey almost succeeded in killing Blake, all I could think about was his kids. I want to live in a world where Blake’s children are treated with the care and gentleness that was shown to me that day. I want to live in a world where a 9 year-old Black girl in mental distress is given support rather than pepper spray to the face at the hands of the Rochester Police Department.

I’ve thought of the hours of therapy that whiteness, and upward mobility into class privilege have afforded me. How desperately I want that kind of healing to be accessible to Blake’s three little kids, to that little girl in Rochester, and to all children who have had to witness and endure state violence.

Last, I think of officer Sheskey himself. I think of how he couldn’t see the humanity or innocence of those children. How on another day, another call, with a car full of other kids, he could have been Officer-Friendly-Help-You-With-Your-Seatbelt teaching them to unbuckle.

In another life, my father could have been on the other side of the criminal injustice equation. He could have been Sheskey. I grew up watching the violence he had committed slowly eat away at my father’s soul. In that alternate reality a badge would have saved him a prison sentence, but it wouldn’t have saved his soul.

I believe that our participation in white supremacist systems requires that we cut off or numb out a significant piece of our own hearts. If it didn’t, we would not be able to continually tolerate, turn a blind eye to, or perpetuate, racial violence. I want more than the anesthetized numb state that whiteness demands of us in exchange for its privileges. I want us to be able to love fully. I want the use of my whole heart.

I know it is not enough simply to tell this story. It’s not enough to merely illustrate and acknowledge white privilege. We have to shine a spotlight on these vast inequities, we have to stare unflinchingly at injustice, and then we have to keep moving forward. We have to work in multi-racial movement to completely transform the criminal injustice system.

And I believe we can all do that by listening to and supporting the demands of Black leaders, Black womxn, Black trans women, the movements for Black Lives. The transformation Black liberation movements demand of our society will make all of us more whole, through the creation and support of truly life-affirming systems. This work demands the unfreezing and the use of our whole hearts.