Matt Driscoll: What we’ll tell our daughter about this week’s tragedies in America

Thursday morning, my wife came into the bathroom as I showered with news that just couldn’t wait.

“It happened again,” she said.

“The police shot another black man last night, during a traffic stop, this time in Minnesota.”

I stood below the water, with no words. I did not yet know the man’s name, but I knew the story, because — as a nation — we’ve watched it play out so many times before.

I thought I knew the turmoil, heartache and hand-wringing that would come next. I thought I knew the competing narratives that would emerge: Some would see another innocent black man murdered at the hands of a racist police force. Others would see a thug who was asking for it, and in some way got what he deserved. Neither would do the complexities justice.

In reality, I had no idea what would come next. No one did. My wife and I proceeded to do what we would have done on any other day. We got ready for work, fed the kids breakfast and moved on with our day.

That night, shortly after my wife put the kids to bed, the news from Dallas began to fill up the Twitter feed on my phone. A sniper had opened fire on police officers watching over a Black Lives Matter protest, killing five cops and wounding seven others. The shooter — identified as 25-year-old Micah Johnson after he died in a standoff with police — wanted to kill police officers, especially white ones, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said.

My wife and I sat on the couch, in silence, stunned by a week of violence and tragedy that felt unmistakably like a crossroads for the country.

Still, on Friday, we woke up like any other day. We got ready for work, fed the kids, and got on with our day.

At some point, however — likely soon — this silence will be broken. Our oldest daughter will ask about what’s transpired this week, and we’ll have to struggle to put the incomprehensible into words.

We’ll have to tell her about the victim in Minnesota, 32-year-old Philando Castile, a beloved employee of the Saint Paul Public Schools last seen bleeding from his wounds in a video live-streamed to Facebook by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds. We’ll have to tell our daughter how Reynolds’ 4-year-old daughter sat in the back of the car, watching it all.

We’ll have to tell her how Castile’s death marked the second time in a week a black man had been shot dead by the police. We’ll have to explain that a day earlier, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Alton Sterling met the same fate. We’ll have to tell her how Sterling was selling CDs outside a convenience store before police arrived, took him to the ground, and fatally shot him.

Most challenging, we’ll have to put these two deaths — and the anger they sparked — into some kind of historical context. We’ll have to tell our daughter about Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. We’ll have to talk again about America’s original sin, slavery, and about years and years of segregation, lynchings, redlining and discrimination that followed it. We’ll have to try to put into words how such a shameful history is even possible in a country that’s supposed to stand for so much more, and we’ll have to tell her about how being black in America is a completely different experience from hers, as a little white girl.

We’ll have to tell her how much work our country has yet to do. And we’ll have to tell her how the shortcomings of our society are reflected in our institutions of power, including law enforcement, but that this is a problem that goes far beyond the police.

We’ll also have to attempt to explain the horror in Dallas and how someone could do such a thing. We’ll have to tell her about the five dead police officers, the families they left behind, and how they died doing their job — protecting and serving. We’ll have to tell her about how nothing — absolutely nothing — can justify such a barbaric act.

Then, we’ll have to tell her about how, as we work to correct all the ways our society has failed people of color, we must condemn acts of inexcusable violence and terror. We’ll have to work hard to put into words how the problems we face as a nation go far beyond an “us versus them” mentality, as some would have us believe.

On this last point, we’ll need to be very clear. We’re in this together. We must disavow the violence, in all forms, and disavow the false narratives. We must challenge the powers that seek to pull us apart. We must be united.

These conversations won’t be easy, of course. But they’ll be necessary.

They’ll be necessary for all of us.

This story was originally published July 8, 2016 at 8:23 PM with the headline "Matt Driscoll: What we’ll tell our daughter about this week’s tragedies in America."