"John came home from his year away, and we had moved on with our lives. Not because we couldn’t talk about it; not because we were hiding anything. Except for a few mortar rounds that had been tossed across the wire, there was no carnage and horror that everyone seemed to assume he had seen. In fact, my experience as a teacher in Baltimore had a higher body count than John’s deployment to a war zone…
“I don’t see race”: It’s such an easy, well-meaning, but dismissive thing that white people say. The truth was, after five years of teaching in Baltimore City, I saw race and the intersection of race and poverty every day with increasing clarity. My students told me about the times they had been followed by shop clerks around stores until they left. That police cars would tap their bikes from the back, sending them careening to the ground on busy streets. A handful had been incarcerated. Others saw their parents through glass windows. And I wept in my apartment after a student had confronted me, asking me why the high school the next county over had French and drama classes and a brand-new building and our school had none of those things…
When DeyQuawn was left to bleed out on his kitchen floor, he was the 250th homicide victim in Baltimore in a year that ended with 344. During that same year, 22 U.S. service members are listed as in-theater fatalities."
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