Target, Don’t Tell Me You ‘Stand With Black Families’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/target-police-racism.html

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UNION, N.J. — Last week, the Target Corporation sent out an email about its commitment to “social justice.” “We stand with black families,” it said. A year and half ago, when a police officer intervened after an incident involving my disabled African-American son in a Target store, our family didn’t even get an apology.

In December 2018, my sitter was shopping with our two boys when my older son tried to hug an employee, gleefully wrapping his arms around her neck. He was 13 at the time and has autism.

He’s not aware that hugging strangers could frighten someone, since he’s done it almost his entire life. When he was younger, folks were delighted by this sweet, gorgeous child who couldn’t put together sentences but showered them with affectionate hugs. But by age 13, he had grown to nearly six feet and his hugs were not as cute to some. His behavioral therapists and I were trying our best to eliminate hugging from his physical lexicon, but it takes people with autism a while to learn new behaviors.

“I’m sorry,” our sitter said immediately, and then again when my son tried to hug the employee once more. She explained that he has autism and is younger than he looks. It was our family protocol. Our son has trouble processing language and calculating his proximity to others, so if he bumps into someone or fails to step aside when asked, we apologize and explain his disability and age. People are usually understanding or, at worst, silent.

Not this time. My sitter remembers the employee responding, “That’s still so [expletive] weird,” pushing my child and then throwing her arm out as if to strike him. Fortunately, she missed.

Concerned for my children’s safety, our sitter told my younger son, then 10, to push the cart, instructed the elder to put his hands in his pockets, and escorted the kids out of Target and into the car.

Before she drove off, the sitter tried to connect to a Spotify playlist to calm everyone down, including herself. This would have been soothing to my 13-year-old. Music was his first language; he could sing before he could speak. But before she could find the “holiday music” he’d asked for, there was a knock at the window.

“Can you step out of the car?” the police officer said.

In the back seat, my 10-year-old anxiously peered through his red-rimmed glasses to watch our sitter answer the officer’s questions. I’d banned the news in our home, but he’d overheard public radio in my husband’s car, and was keenly aware of the police shootings of defenseless black people.

I’d tried everything I could to protect my children’s innocence and shield them from harm, even subconsciously curating their appearance to make them more palatable to even the most inhumane individuals in our society. I bought them skinny jeans instead of comfortable baggy ones and made sure they wore bright colors. But none of that matters. In thinking about my children being a car window away from a police officer and, I assume, a holstered gun, I understood that Target was also full of bright colors, and its logo, as red as my son’s glasses, was a bull’s-eye.

The sitter continued talking to the officer. “He’s 14 — no, 13,” she told him, flustered. “He has autism.” She said she’d informed the store as well.

When the officer finished with his questions, he asked the store managers who were waiting in the background if they felt a case should be pursued. There was a long silence as they mulled it over.

I won’t list the many black people, including children, who have been killed at the hands of self-described vigilantes or police officers — it’s all the news has been talking about since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. That list feels interminable, especially when developmentally disabled people are added to it.

Last year, an off-duty police officer shot and killed a developmentally disabled man, and wounded his parents, in a California Costco. A few years earlier, Charles Kinsey, a black health care aide, was shot in the leg by the police while trying to help a 26-year-old with autism, Arnaldo Rios Soto. In that case, the policeman missed his target — the bullet was intended for the young autistic man who sat in the street playing with his toy truck.

The fact that our sitter is white is never lost on me when I think of that day at Target, and I suspect it offered some layer of protection for my children. The managers finally told the police officer to just let them go, but before our tearful sitter got back into the car, the officer checked in to see how she was doing. I have often wondered why he didn’t also ask about my children, as if they weren’t vulnerable or fragile, as if a part of their innocence hadn’t been shattered, as if it were impossible for terror to simmer beneath their young skin.

That afternoon, after I heard what had happened, I watched my older son play one of his original compositions over and over again on the piano, searching for residual cracks in his being. He is sensitive, perhaps more so than neurotypical folks. He can hear sounds at decibels most humans can’t, and his deepest feelings operate on frequencies many can’t detect. Before bed, I hugged him as long as he needed.

I cuddled my 10-year old as he shared with me how scared he was for his brother, how there were parts he couldn’t describe because he was too afraid to watch, how it made him nervous to see his sitter cry.

That my children — and so many black and brown children — had been needlessly confronted by law enforcement fed that teratoma of anger and anxiety growing inside me.

Shortly after, I shifted from nurturer to advocate. My son wasn’t the only one who needed to learn new ways of interacting with people. The Target supervisor my husband spoke to appeared dismissive, so I emailed the company’s chief executive, Brian Cornell, and other members of the leadership team. Eventually, a woman named Amy contacted me. She would not give me her last name.

I asked her: How could Target allow a situation to escalate after the store knows the customer is a child, particularly one with autism? What systems can you put in place to avoid having the police being involved in the future? Does Target train its employees on how to work with developmentally disabled customers? Yes, you must care about the safety of your employees, but shouldn’t you also care about the safety of your customers?

She said that Target had done a thorough investigation and that surveillance tapes showed that my oldest put his arms around the employee’s neck as if to choke her. A hug consists of putting one’s arms around someone’s neck, too, I pointed out, challenging her audacity. I asked to see the video; she said no. I asked her to call me back with real answers, reiterating that if I didn’t hear back I’d assume Target was not interested in our concerns. No one from Target ever got in touch with me again. I surmised that choking was their story.

The people and organizations that tried to protect those who killed the 17-year-olds Trayvon Martin and Antwon Rose II, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, told stories, too. Stories that made beautiful children seem threatening and violent. Stories that justified their murders.

Today, companies are tripping over themselves to act as if they actually care about inequality and social justice for African-Americans. Why did it have to take burning stores and the prospect of financial distress for these businesses to start treating black people — or disabled people, or children, for God’s sake — with humanity?

Despite the onslaught of terrible news, my family and I, still quarantined together, bake chocolate-chip banana bread, my husband’s hands holding steady the bowl on our overused mixer while my kids pour in the ingredients. The boys jump and giggle on the trampoline, then eat blueberries under the late sun. My children will be happy. But my husband and I — and the black community — will stay vigilant.

Long after the news cycle makes its eventual turn away from issues concerning African-Americans, we’ll see whether these companies fulfill their promises or if, in fact, they’re just telling stories.

Doreen Oliver, who wrote and performs the one-woman show “Everything Is Fine Until It’s Not,” is working on a memoir.

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