School’s out. Summer’s practically here. And it’s time for kids all over the nation to cut loose and enjoy their vacation with water fights and cookout parties. Unfortunately, not all young people can party when and wherever they want without being suspected of being a nuisance or a troublemaker. And that’s exactly what happened in McKinney, Texas recently.
There was a party in a mostly white neighborhood. Kids of different backgrounds including white, black, Latino and Arabic were invited or were able to attend. However, the mostly white neighbors thought something was wrong in their utopia of whiteness as a few of them confronted the children of color using racial slurs. One of them, a white woman, even smacked one of the teens in the face.
Somewhere around this time, a white guy name Sean Toon called the police. Apparently, the sight of black children in his neck of the woods frightened him. So, he phoned the police about a disturbance in the white force.
A while later, a white officer by the name of Eric Casebolt arrives, and things went downhill from there as the crazy cop chased the teens of color with a gun pointed at them. During his brief visit, Casebolt decided to tackle and hold down a young black teen girl wearing a bikini. Her name is Dajerria Becton.
The whole fiasco was caught on tape by one of the teens who is white and gave an honest account on the whole thing. The most striking thing he observed was that the cops targeted the teens of color while ignoring the white teens. The video surfaced and is now an internet pariah.
Opinions of the incident are divided with many on the side of the police (big surprise). Some people defended the cop for attacking unarmed children, even Dajerria Becton who got the worst of it. Those people include some of the white residents in McKinney and the right wing-based news media who insisted that the children were wrong and should’ve complied with the police. Other news outlets suggested that the kids started their own mess. Therefore, they got their just desserts. Some even suggested that the cop and the residents were scared and had every right to be. Some say that the cop had a right to defend himself against – again – unarmed black children. But they’re not racist, right?
But there are those of us with working hearts and brains know this was too much. No child, especially those who have done nothing wrong, deserved this kind of treatment. But this is America where black skin is a sign of criminality and deviance. The teens’ only crime was being black in a white neighborhood, and despite this being 2015, racism is still part of the American way of life as there are white folks who seem content with fearing and hating black people, a symptom of white supremacy.
This is another reason in a growing list of incidents that define why black people don’t and can’t trust the police. Our well-being is always out of the question while our skin color is always in question.
Since that incident, Officer Casebolt has been placed on administrative leave, and have since resigned from the force soon after the video was released. Yet, his name is added to the list of cops who have shown he was out for the blood of black people, no matter how young they are. In the meantime, this shows that in this country, black youth can’t have a good time without racist white adult interference.