Kansas City parents of black, mixed-race children, on their fears, hopes

Parenting has always been a crazy leap of faith into unforeseeable joy and pain.

And terror.

Every parent knows the heart-stopping fear of a baby’s temperature spiking to 104, a preschooler vanishing into a crowd at the mall, a teenager out too late and not texting back.

Parents raising black children deal with all that — plus.

This month the Washington Post reported that statistics show unarmed blacks are five times more likely than unarmed whites to be shot and killed by police.

This month, the killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., on successive days, followed by killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, have ratcheted racial tension up to levels unseen since the 1960s.

[From New York to Ferguson to Baton Rouge, an interactive timeline of untimely deaths involving police]

Parents raising non-black children fret over how to teach them about stranger danger without making them overly fearful. Parents raising black children have a more wrenching conversation: explaining to their children that they may be viewed as the dangerous stranger because of the color of their skin.

In a TED talk called “How to Raise a Black Son in America,” Clint Smith describes the “profound unfairness” his parents must have felt feeling they had to “strip away part of my childhood just so that I could come home at night.” When Smith was 12 years old, he remembers his father dragging him away from a SuperSoaker battle with white friends in a hotel parking lot. His father told him, “You can’t act the same as your white friends. You can’t pretend to shoot guns. You can’t run around in the dark.”

In February, an episode of the ABC sitcom “Black-ish,” starring Tracee Ellis Ross and Anthony Anderson as parents of a contemporary black family, culminated in an argument over how much they should expose their children to TV coverage of alleged police brutality against African-Americans.

Ross, as the mother, laments: “I don’t want to feel like my kids are living in a world that is so flawed they can’t have any hope.”

How do Kansas City parents of the next generation of black youth endure and prevail in these turbulent times?

We asked four families to share their experiences with us. These are their stories, in their own words.

‘Our boys are dying’: Overland Park mom on the anxiety of raising black boys

White KC mom of mixed family on why she constantly checks white privilege

‘It breaks your heart’: KC mom on teaching her sons about racism

Why this KC couple are raising their black daughters to be fearless

This story was originally published July 24, 2016 at 5:31 AM with the headline "Kansas City parents of black, mixed-race children, on their fears, hopes."