Photo/Diana Berek.
Another shooting death hits close to my home, and close to my heart. His name was Quintin Brown, 17-years-old; a boy with a goofy grin and a sense of loving the moment he was in, a boy who called my daughter “Momma Bear” and called me “Grandma” so much I was beginning to think he was one of my grandkids.
Quintin’s mom is having a hard time finding a funeral home because the police determined his shooting was gang-related. Funeral homes are skittish about gang retaliations. Quintin isn’t being mourned in the media as an “innocent bystander caught up in another senseless killing.” But I knew Quintin. While he was no angel, he was no monster, either. Quintin was always respectful toward me and my daughter, who wrote this about him on social media: “I remember Quintin and my boys singing, rapping and clowning around in the house; I remember them trying to cook and burning all my pots and pans; I remember the three of them trying to teach themselves how to do laundry. Now that was as funny as a Saturday Night Live skit!”
This is the reality: Our kids may not be angelic, or “innocent” by bourgeois standards, but they’re not monsters, either. They are children struggling with a negative narrative that the police and the media have thrown over them like a poisoned blanket. They are children who love music, children who love to eat; children who don’t want to move every damn year because they’d been profiled by police so it tripped an alert to the landlords who then demand they vacate because of “Crime-Free Ordinances” or the family has to move again because the rent’s getting raised; children who watch their moms cry over not having enough to pay for the rent or the utilities; children who just want to not feel like the whole neighborhood hates them because they wear dreads and hoodies; kids who don’t want to have to duck out of sight because the police turned a corner.
We must create a compassionate society that supports struggling families. We have to stop criminalizing every damn thing! We have to cut the strangulation of bureaucracy that makes resources so hard to access and schools so inflexible, so adversarial and off-putting that the kids give up and drop out. Housing security, food security, education and healthcare must be available to all!
