Sheletta: Black moms must be guardians and bodyguards

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When my 12-year-old son, Brandon, brought home a permission slip for a class field trip to a Twins game, I called his teacher to ask if I could be a chaperone.

“Oh no,” he told me, his words accompanied by a judgmental tone. “Brandon is a seventh-grader now. These children don’t need adult supervision.”

It was an echo of what my white girlfriends are always telling me: “You are such a helicopter mom! Stop holding your kids back.”

There is nothing I’d love more than to let my son spend the day at the ballpark with his friends without me. You think I want to be around fifty-leven tweenaged boys for five hours? In the words of that great American prophet Eminem, I’d rather stick nine-inch nails through each one of my eyelids.

But I have to watch and make sure my child is safe because, in President Donald Trump’s America, that seventh inning stretch could turn tragic if he accidentally whistles, winks at, bumps into, breathes on or sneezes without covering near the wrong white woman at just the right time.

Black mothers can’t just be guardians, we must be bodyguards, too.

We are on assignment — to keep our children from being murdered.

I’m not paranoid. I’m proactive about protecting my son from an incident like the harsh, unhinged cruelty that was on display recently at a public park in Rochester.

My Brandon — a friendly, studious, kind child — is on the spectrum, vulnerable and unaware of how his curiosity could get him killed. He lacks situational awareness and doesn’t understand when people mean him harm.

He’s so trusting, he’ll walk straight to the scary-looking white van to see that puppy and, without a doubt, take the candy from that creepy-looking stranger.

What happens if Brandon is at the ballpark and bumps into some drunk fan who says my son tried to pick his pocket? Brandon’s innocence could subject him to vile, racist insults and bullying that could quickly escalate.

Who will be there to protect him? To call out a lie?

Me, that’s who.

When they were 5 years old, Brandon or one of my other two neurodiverse children might have seen a toy in a diaper bag that belonged to another child and reached for it.

That’s apparently what set off a white woman named Shiloh Hendrix last week at a playground in Rochester. While holding her own child, Hendrix cussed out and insulted a 5-year-old Black boy with autism, repeatedly calling him the N-word for just that behavior.

But she didn’t back down in shame. Unlike the other “Karens” whose despicable behavior has been caught on camera, this one didn’t cry and say that she’s really not at all like that person on video.

No, Hendrix went ten-toes-in and continued her racist tirade, knowing she was being filmed.

And when folks around the world saw her performance, she did not apologize. Incredibly, she leveraged her hateful behavior for financial gain.

After she acted a fool, she sat up on her couch and set up a funding site. Not to raise money to pay for therapy for the child she traumatized, or a trip to Disney for his entire family for the grief she caused, but to line her own pockets.

Rather than being ostracized for her outrageous behavior, Hendrix played herself as a victim, claiming she is in a “dire situation” and begged for money online “to assist in protecting my family” and potentially “relocate.”

As more than $650,000 poured in, she thanked her donors for their “overwhelming support.”

What a welfare mom.

Like the “Karens” who have come before, she weaponized her whiteness, convincing like-minded men and women to take the sheets off their heads, go online and put all their coins in the coffers of a woman who called a little Black boy that word.

Hendrix knows the power of playing a white woman in distress who must be saved from a 5-year-old villainous Black criminal mastermind, known around these parts as the Diaper Bag Bandit, mouth still filled with baby teeth, who rides all over Rochester in a big wheel rummaging through diaper bags to steal fruit snacks and juice boxes.

What a courageous hero she is for standing up to, or rather, kneeling down to his three-foot frame. Lord have mercy. I don’t know why I’m getting my blood pressure up over this situation when I should be celebrating because at least this sweet little innocent Black boy is still alive.

What happened at this park in Rochester is not an isolated incident. It’s happening all over this country. It’s been happening. It never stopped happening. This time, someone was just brave enough to film it.

Let me remind you of what happened to another Black boy, Emmett Till.

It will be 70 years ago this August when the 14-year-old left his mother Mamie Till Mobley and their Chicago home to visit his kinfolk in Mississippi for summer vacation.

That’s where a white woman said he whistled at her.

For this, Till was abducted, tortured and shot in the head before his body was tossed in the river. We all remember that heartbreaking picture of his mother’s face as she stood at his casket, left open at her insistence, so everyone could see how her son had been mutilated.

Even before Black history was being erased, I’m here to tell you, Black mothers will never forget what happened to him. Still to this day, we are required to parent in a way that prevents a similar fate from happening to our sons.

I don’t want to be the next Mamie Till Mobley.

That’s why I’m always with my children, whether they are at the tennis court, swimming at the Y or riding their bikes at the park.

Black mothers can’t parent passively; we are required to be alert, anticipating and attuned. Our vigilance takes the form of intentional, strategic surveillance.

That’s why it’s absolutely and always necessary that we go with our sons to Boy Scout jamborees, soccer practices and, in the case of my son Brandon, the ballpark. That’s how we can make sure there are no “misunderstandings” about innocent childlike behavior that white boys get grace for but Black boys get killed for.

Brandon’s father has been granted permission to be there to chaperone the field trip to Target Field.

That’s our best bet that he will come home safe.

As that great African American philosopher Childish Gambino once said, “This is America.”