@snood,
I am a white woman who is married to a black man and we have a son. Some years ago he was badly beaten by police. When I went to the hospital emergency room I saw an ambulance drive up and a gurney was pulled out. What I saw looked like a body covered in a sheet. My first though was "Oh, my God I'm going to be one of those women whose son is killed by the cops." The lump in my throat was so big I could barely breathe. Then my husband rushed over and told me it was not our son. I still thought I was about to die. I still shook like a leaf. I still felt my heart pounding in my chest.
Later they brought our son in and he was in bad shape, but he was alive. I feel that at that time I was given the smallest, smallest insight into what black women feel when their sons are killed by the police. I felt that for the first time I began to move from having an intellectual knowledge that such things happen, to understanding the emotional impact of such events.
