The way we was raise by our parents, color don’t matter; as I post this message I can truly say that in our family back in Greenville, we have whites, blacks, brown skin and many other, and we all lived in the same home, sleep in the same bed, eat the same food, my family, sisters, brothers, and friends back in Greenville can share their own love concerning this testimony. This is how our parents brought us up to be. Unfortunately many parts of America weren’t so fortunate. The story below is a heartfelt story for this family. Hopefully the son in the picture will turn out ok, he is face with a lot, but he has two parents who love him. He will be ok. /// Ferguson, Missouri (CNN)For a while, Stefannie Wheat wished she could turn back the clock to a time before the hot August afternoon when Michael Browns body fell limp on Canfield Road. She grew frustrated and angry that her life was upended by the shooting death of an unarmed young black man at the hands of a white police officer -- and by everything that transpired in the aftermath. The demonstrations, the looting, the violence. The verbal venom hurled at her family and the way matters of race suddenly became front and center. Wheat faced confrontations with protesters who saw her as another white woman who didnt understand. Never mind that she has been married to a black man for 18 years and that they adopted a black child. They took shots at her husband Ken, too -- calling him a sellout, a black man siding with the white community, partly because the Wheats are good friends with Ferguson Mayor James Knowles. The couple had tried to raise their son Christopher in a home where race was invisible. Ken and I dont discuss race with Christopher, Stefannie says. We discuss character. They largely succeeded in their plan. Until everything changed. Now as a new year begins, Stefannie realizes life in Ferguson can never be the same. And that she has been changed, too. I didnt have a choice, she says one afternoon over a lunch of shrimp and pasta she prepared at her home just two blocks from the Ferguson Police Department, the staging ground for demonstrations. Behind her, the window pane in her back door is busted -- broken by an intruder caught on the Wheats newly installed surveillance camera. Stefannie covered the shattered glass with plywood and painted it to look like a ribbon-tied Christmas gift. She suspects the intruder was someone linked to protesters who taunted her before. She cannot forgive such acts of violation but has also come to accept that perhaps the frustrations of Fergusons majority black community have long simmered beneath the surface. We became blind to what was happening around us, she says. A conversation with a friend made her rethink her frame of reference. So did watching her 10-year-old son deal with the ugly ways race can be made an issue. A boy at school asked him: Why is your mother white? What does it matter? Christopher responded. A mom is a mom no matter what color they are. Why is your mom black? Stefannie was proud of her sons answer. But she has also come to realize that she cant shield him from racial prejudice. Weve lived in our own circle for so long that weve forgotten it exists, she says. Theres apparently an underlying need for change in Ferguson. I dont want to go back to the normal we knew.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 06:15:46 +0000
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