Color Blind
RAINBOW OVER LAKE. Roxie Mirabelle Forbes, 5 years old.
By Doug Forbes
I can only imagine what my 6-year-old daughter Roxie would think were she to watch as the blood and tears of her brothers and sisters stain the asphalt of American cities far and wide.
And when I say “her brothers and sisters,” I mean young and old, urban and suburban, rich and poor, whole or broken, dark skin or light. We are each other’s brothers and sisters. Always have been.
But families fight. Some worse than others—to a point when wounds wend their way in so deep that the fabric of our beings bends tenfold until it all but breaks.
Should my girl have remained on this earth with me, we would have watched just enough of this soul-bending to discuss why brothers and sisters are breaking each other’s bones and spirits. Roxie was going to grow up with the truth despite the consequences.
But she never got that chance. She was killed by adults who decided that protecting reputations and assets superseded the truth of the circumstances .
Yes, the truth does hurt. But it also helps. It also heals. And there was no way in hell that my child would have emerged into adulthood without a full understanding of why truth is the very last bulwark for reality.
And the reality is that children are largely color blind. Until they aren’t. Until their parents entomb the truth to such a degree that fiction does indeed become fact. When adults say that children should not be burdened with such matters, adults are merely doing what they do best—sweep history and accountability under their dirty rugs.
The fact is that white police officers murdered yet another brother of ours. A black man was savaged under the spotlight of the sun, under the kneecap of a beast. His last vista was that of tire treads and age-old pavement. The reason he could not breathe was because the slave ships are still docking, the nooses are still hanging and our history books are still emptying the truth into sewers.
We are—by mission—a child safety nonprofit. But at the core of what we do as an organizational body is the core of what we should consider doing as a national body: own our responsibility to leave this world a better place than we found it— a playground for big hearts, open minds and arms wrapped firmly about each other’s shoulders as we soldier on through this mysterious life.
Black people were kidnapped and brought to the United States of America where Jamestown, Virginia, colonists bought them 500 years ago. They bought them and then they broke them. And colony after colony, state after state continued to buy and break them for another 250 years until the Emancipation Proclamation freed them largely on paper only.
Now 250 years from Lincoln’s legacy, 56 years since the Civil Rights Act, we continue to break our black brothers and sisters. We continue to lynch them, not with nooses, but with billy clubs and bullets, prison cells and punitive policy-making, and with a bully-monster president with a digital bully pulpit.
Our children are witnessing our feeble fiber, our failure to reach down and lift up. We kneel on necks and break lives in minutes. We watch it all and make wishes as if we expect some rainbow to grow.
But wishing is not working. We must actually work every day to transition our children into better, bolder citizens than we are in this moment. Children love rainbows. We all do. But rainbows only stir our souls after storms. And they are not made of one color.