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FEATURING EISA NEFERTARI ULEN – We live at a time when as a society, thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, we are finally accepting that police violence disproportionately impacts African Americans. But black folk have known this forever. And black parents in particular have known it and feared for their children. It is part of “the talk” that black parents all over the US have with their children – how to interact with police if they have the misfortune to be stopped by law enforcement. How not to act “suspicious,” how to move without eliciting violent reactions, how not to reach for your wallet. In other words, how to survive a police encounter. It is a horrifying thing to have to live with as parents, knowing that the forces meant to protect and serve your family, may well simply kill you for no reason at all.

Read Ulen’s essay in Bitch magazine ‘If We Must Wear Ourselves Out, Let It Be Because We Build,’ HERE.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning, a novel described by The Washington Post as “a call for healing in the African American community from generations of hurt and neglect.” She is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her essay entitled, “Black Parenting Matters: Raising Children in a World of Police Terror” was published in the new book, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

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