I can still feel the weight on my chest as my husband and I left the theater in silence after A Quiet Place<\/i>. As a parent in general \u2014 but specifically as a parent of a little black boy \u2014 it felt all too real, this high-stakes world in which merely existing can be deadly and the smallest mistake could snatch everything away. A Quiet Place<\/i>\u00a0(now on DVD\/streaming) was an allegory for my life as a parent that I wasn\u2019t expecting to get. <\/span><\/p>\n I watched in pure gut-wrenching horror as the youngest child, Beau, was taken away by one of the sightless creatures that inhabits their world. It\u2019s a helpless feeling: There was nothing that could have been done to save him. Both parents\u2019 caution and care weren\u2019t enough to overcome this one time their child decided to be a child in a world where that\u2019s tougher than it ought to be. <\/span><\/p>\n There are many fingers to go around when it comes to the blame game. Why wasn\u2019t Beau carried like his older brother? Why was he walking behind everyone else? Why did his sister give him the toy after his father took it away? All valid questions \u2014 but hindsight is 20\/20. Parents are human and very much full of lapses in judgment. It\u2019s only in a world where the stakes are unnaturally high that those lapses are unforgivable. <\/span><\/p>\n I instantly thought of Tamir Rice, the young black boy gunned down by officers while playing with a toy gun in the park. Numerous questions have been asked about how that incident could have been prevented, many of them putting the onus on the child and his parents and overlooking the fact that the stakes shouldn\u2019t be so high. It simply should not be<\/i> that playing with a toy gun can result in a child\u2019s death, but that\u2019s the society we live in. Beau turning on a noisy toy shouldn\u2019t have cost him his life, either. In that moment, all the \u201cright\u201d things his parents had done before didn\u2019t matter \u2014 all it took was one slip-up in an unforgiving world. <\/span><\/p>\n When Lee sets off with his eldest son to show him the daily routines necessary to navigate this world, I couldn\u2019t help but think of how someday my husband will teach our son how to drive, something that should be as mundane as fishing but which requires more lessons when the child is black. We\u2019ll have to teach him how to behave so that he lowers the likelihood of becoming a hashtag, another life lost for Driving While Black, pulled over by someone with an itchy trigger finger. And we\u2019ll know that even if he does all the \u201cright\u201d things, it could still not be enough. <\/span><\/p>\n So why continue to bring children into a world that is so hostile to them? That question crossed my mind (maybe yours, too) when it\u2019s revealed that Evelyn is pregnant, a year after Beau was killed. I\u2019ve wondered the same thing. Why would my husband and I bring a child into this world knowing how hostile it can be to black people and other marginalized people? Maybe it\u2019s the hope that things can improve. Maybe we can provide a life that offsets the ugly reality, perhaps raising an individual who will be part of finding solutions to make the future better. <\/span><\/p>\n The film thankfully ends with a glimmer of hope. Regan, the daughter, finally realizes that her cochlear implant has an effect on the monsters, giving her mom a chance to take one out. The reprieve is short-lived \u2014 the gunshot brings more of the creatures \u2014 but the hope of a safer tomorrow rings out. The sacrifice and heartache might not be in vain. As the credits rolled, I sat in my seat and shook, quietly pondering parenthood and the lengths to which I\u2019ll go to keep my child safe in this harsh world.<\/span><\/p>\n I can still feel the weight on my chest as my husband and I left the theater in silence after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":540,"featured_media":9702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-on-the-marquee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/540"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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