(August 27, 2016) Earlier, this summer, when it appeared that there daily accounts of police shootings, protests of those shootings and targeting shootings of police officers, some argued one reason why encounters between blacks, and especially African-American men, often ended tragically is because black parents don’t educate their children on how to respond when they encounter law enforcement. That perception is not true. There are books, workshops and conferences that constantly address this issue, not to mention the millions of conversations taking place between parents and children at kitchen tables in black homes across America.
The historically fraught relationship between law enforcement and the black community is what sparked the single “Badge and a Gun,” a track from Rasheed Ali’s 1968: Black Power album that sounds like a conversation that a mother might have with her son in 1968 – or in 2016. Check it out.
Rasheed Ali – “Badge and a Gun”
