On Saturday I drove with my family to Peoria, Illinois, for an athletic competition. We stopped at a gas station off Interstate 55 to use the restroom. The station sold fishing tackle and snacks. It also sold bumper stickers.

One of them said “Black Trucks Matter.”

Two days earlier, on Thursday, a 14-year-old African-American boy, Brennan Walker, overslept and missed his school bus. He started walking to school, trying to re-create his bus route, but he got lost.

He approached a house in a subdivision and knocked on the door, looking for directions to his high school in Rochester Hills, Michigan. The white woman who answered, irrationally fearing Walker was a burglar, screamed for her husband, Jeffrey Zeigler, who grabbed his shotgun and chased after the teenager. Zeigler fired at Walker as he ran and, thank God, missed.

What if he hadn’t?

Also on Thursday, two black men were arrested, fingerprinted and photographed for trying to meet a guy for coffee.

A Philadelphia Starbucks manager called 911 and reported the men were trespassing after they used the restroom and sat at a table without ordering anything.

Customers recorded video of police officers removing the men as their friend, Andrew Yaffe, who is white, arrives. Customers can be heard defending the two men, and Yaffe can be seen and heard on a video asking, “Why would they be asked to leave? I wanted to get coffee for two black guys sitting and meeting with me.”

Yaffe has been identified as a real estate investor. I can think of a dozen reasons the men wouldn’t order until he arrived, particularly if the three were meeting for business. I can only think of one reason they were arrested.

Starbucks corporate issued an apology Saturday. The police department has launched an internal investigation.I wish we lived in a nation, in a world, where a man shooting at a lost 14-year-old boy conjured universal revulsion. I wish we lived in a nation, in a world, where we felt universal outrage that two men were led away in handcuffs, their dignity and humanity stripped, for waiting at a Starbucks.

We don’t.

We live in a world where a lot of white people will shrug off those stories as isolated incidents, rather than products of a culture that unfairly, unrelentingly conflates blackness with criminality.

We live in a world where a white woman answers her door to a black teen and doesn’t even hear his words. She sees his skin color, and she screams. Her husband decides he must be shot.

We live in a world where black men waiting at Starbucks -- something I’ve done in my white skin more times than I can count -- are assumed by management to be up to something.

We live in a world where a lot of white people need to be reminded that black lives matter -- and yet they receive that reminder as an insult. A provocation. A punch line.

Black Trucks Matter.

Lisa Wright, Brennan Walker’s mom, was at work when police called to tell her about Zeigler shooting at her son. Her husband is deployed overseas, she told reporters, and she initially thought the call was about him.

She also said she wasn’t that surprised to learn someone tried to shoot her black son. She’s warned her son not to wear hoodies and to keep his hands out of his pockets. She has taught him to be polite and approachable. She knows his skin makes him a target. Of course she does.

America has a lot of work to do if we’re going to get to a place where our children have an equal shot at growing up safely, untouched by violence and injustice, regardless of their skin color. We’ll get there faster if we work shoulder-to-shoulder.

On Twitter Saturday night, a man named Chris Evans wrote: “White people: watch the Starbucks arrest video. See the white folks arguing with the police and asking why two innocent black men were being arrested? THIS is how you use your privilege. Because if one of us had said something we’d get arrested too.”

That’s a good start.

White people also need to acknowledge that all too often, in all too many places, black lives are treated as though they don’t matter. That’s not a provocation or a punch line. It’s the truth. And it’s unacceptable.


By Heidi Stevens

Heidi Stevens writes the Balancing Act column for the Chicago Tribune. -- Ed.


(Tribune Content Agency)