My father didn’t live long enough to have “the talk” with me, and when it fell in my mother’s lap, she completely botched the task.
I’m not talking about that talk.
I’m talking about the other talk, the painful discussion that many, if not most, black parents eventually have with their kids.
This is the real-world conversation where adolescents are instructed about how to deal with police when they are stopped for no good reason.
My moment — that is, my first moment — happened on Eastern Parkway and Utica Avenue in Brooklyn when I got into a dollar cab with my mother and brother.
The cop who pulled the car over wasn’t after the driver. He was after me. I was a tall, skinny black kid with a baseball cap, and I fit the description of someone who was robbing people on the subway.
It didn’t matter that I was wearing a baseball cap because I had been to a baseball game. I fit the description, and no one was going anywhere.
I was uncooperative. I was angry. My mother, the churchgoing teacher, didn’t help. She was indignant, and she spewed words she would never use in the classroom.
Only when the cop threatened to haul her to the precinct did I come around.
Lesson learned. Damage done.
I thought about that close call as I read about Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy shot dead in Florida by an overzealous neighborhood watchman.
Although Trayvon was not killed by police, “the talk” is still a topic of conversation.
The not-if-but-when scenario has made necessary a pride-swallowing set of instructions with one purpose in mind — stay alive.
Children in these households are told to set aside their rights and display a subservience not unlike their grandfathers and great-grandfathers exhibited before the civil-rights movement.
The talk is as real as the birds and the bees, and far more awkward.
“Whenever your children go out in an urban environment, you worry,” said the Rev. Conrad Tillard, pastor of Brooklyn’s Nazarene Congregational Church. “You worry about the bad guys, but you also have to worry about the people in blue uniforms.”
Tillard, the father of four sons and one daughter, said he knew it was time to talk to one of his sons when he saw the boy tense up with fear at the sight of police who had stopped him days earlier on the subway.
“It’s really a painful paradox,” Tillard said. “When you know you haven’t done anything wrong, it’s very difficult. Even though you may be in the right, life and death may hang in the balance. You can’t win in that situation. Live to make it through that confrontation.”
Eric Adams, a state senator and former police captain, had the same conversation with his son after the boy was stopped by a cop in a movie theater for no good reason.
“It was difficult,” Adams said. “In one breath, you say that in this country you can be anything you want to be based on your ability. You give him the speech. Yet he can’t sit down and enjoy a movie.”
Even so, Adams tells his child that he has to go beyond being respectful. He has to bend over backward.
“A lot of people take offense to that,” Adams said. “They say, ‘Why do we have to be different?’ It’s not a comfortable conversation, but it’s a real conversation for this day and time.
“The birds and the bees is a walk in the park. You can clearly explain it. You can’t explain this.”