Kristie Anyabwile shares her fears and where she finds comfort and refuge
My son hasn’t always known he was black. For the first seven years of his life, he primarily referred to people in shades of browns and tans, and certainly didn’t know that being black could mark him as a target.
That only happened when we moved to the US in the summer of 2014, the summer of the shootings of Eric Garner and Mike Brown and John Crawford. After an idyllic upbringing on a tropical island in the Caribbean, my son had all the uncertainty and excitement any seven-year-old third-culture kid would have in moving to his country of citizenship and living in a big city for the first time. But uncertainty quickly overtook excitement as that horrible summer unfolded into a long season of black death perpetrated by police officers, culminating in the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
