V.

Richard Sherman is right.

Twitter trolls use coded language so they can spew white supremacist hatred and fly beneath Twitter’s language regulations radar. My Facebook feed fills with white men and women casually referring to Black and brown men as thugs. Black and brown men looting stores in Ferguson are thugs, say these white people in my newsfeed, my so-called friends. White kids looting stores and overturning cars in New Hampshire are hooligans and pranksters and “kids who will be kids.” Grown-ass white American athletes trashing a bathroom at the Rio Olympics are “kids.” But Black and brown equals bad, lower, and you will call them thugs and your newscasters will call them thugs and we will cower in the corner of your imagined reality.

Richard Sherman is Trayvon Martin in a Seahawks jersey. He’s straight outta Compton with a 4.2 high school GPA and a football scholarship to Stanford and a successful Stanford student and a professional football player and maybe this is not recognizable to you? That he can be all these things? Black and all these things? And if you don’t recognize the Black person at your door as your neighbor or an athlete or an entertainer or as your professor or your president, if you don’t recognize this person, you call the cops and when they come to your door, the cops will shoot the unrecognized Black person ten times or was it twelve and it wasn’t the car accident that killed Jonathan Ferrell, this Florida A&M University football player, but the gun shot ten times and the 911 phone caller white lady presuming Black equals thug. Jonathan Ferrell’s family buried their promising son and that white lady will never go to jail for her criminal behavior. Like Zimmerman’s you call her fear of the Black man reasonable. Justified.

I kiss my Black teenaged son good night, night after night, lie awake in bed trying to figure out how to prepare him for life in “post-racial America” night after night after night.