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

Fay Ferrando, 54, has lived in Independence and Kansas City her whole life.

She says she never feared harm from police. “The fear was, you would be hassled. There was no fear of being shot, I never heard of it.”

But after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death in 2012, Ferrando says, she started getting more scared. In 2014, racial tensions grew nationwide after Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., were killed by police.

That same year, every parent of a black child’s worst nightmare became reality in Cleveland when police shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice after mistaking his toy gun for a real weapon.

“That’s when I thought I needed to arm my boys with some defenses and information and tools to deal with police officers,” Ferrando, a single mom of three sons, says. “I asked my black male friends, ‘What should I tell them to do?’ ”

She needed to have “the talk.”

The answers came back: Look the officer in the eye. Get the badge number and name if possible. Be respectful. Say, “Yes, sir.” Whatever they tell you to do, comply.

The goal: “To make stops by police as peaceful and brief as possible,” Ferrando says.

Ferrando’s oldest “sun” as she likes to refer to her sons, is Tixo (TEE-ko) Ferrando, 22. Tixo graduated from Rockhurst High School and will graduate from the University of Missouri in December after he finishes an internship at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

Ferrando asked Tixo to help her talk about traffic-stop safety with his younger brothers, Jabari Best, 17, and Malik Best, 16. He confided to Ferrando that he had witnessed more disparity in how his white and black friends were treated by police while he was in high school than he had previously told her.

He said once he was riding in a black friend’s Mercedes when the friend was pulled over for no stated reason; the officer insinuated the car was stolen. Another time, in a white friend’s car, Tixo was frightened when his friend starting cussing at a police officer who pulled him over and surprised there were no consequences.

Middle son Jabari, a senior at Lincoln Prep taking the full International Baccalaureate curriculum and considering applying to Harvard or Yale, dreads it when Ferrando asks scenario questions: “What are you going to do if you get stopped by police and you don’t have your license with you because you forgot it at home?”

“Jabari says, ‘Oh, Mom, I know what to do! I know what to do!’ ” she says. “I’m not sure why he gets flustered by it.”

Youngest son Malik is more relaxed. “He’ll answer patiently, ‘I would do this …’ ‘I would do that …’ ”

Still, it doesn’t stop the anxiety.

“I don’t think I can describe what it feels like. I try to go to sleep, I say, ‘Text me when you get home.’ I have to know where they are at all times. Sometimes I have heart palpitations thinking they might not ever come back home. I get angry that I have to feel like this,” she says.

“Everything is worse when it happens to your child. You created this wonderfully unique piece of art, this perfect flower, and you just want it to continue to flourish. You want them to be great citizens of the universe, but in order for them to be that, they are going to have to learn how to deal with everybody on every level, so you have to tell them about the ugly truth of racism.

“And I have to break it down and get them to not react violently and try to get them to see that those people have learned the wrong way about life and humanity.

“It happened at school for my youngest son, Malik, especially. It’s so hurtful to his spirit when he’s doing the same thing in class as white kids and he is the one to get sent out. I have to tell him because of the color of your skin, they are always going to assume you did it. It breaks your heart,” she says.

Ferrando pauses. She is an exceptionally upbeat person, but she admits she cried all weekend after the terrible week of the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings and the shooting of the police officers in Dallas. She exhales and pulls up the corners of her mouth slightly, as if struggling against an unseen counterweight.

“I have faith, and I believe, and if we can just try to send love to the people that hate and the people that do wrong and ask them, ‘Why are you so afraid of my boys?’ ” Her smile collapses and she begins to cry softly. “Why are they so afraid of us?”

Twenty seconds of silence later, Ferrando, whose voicemail message begins with her singing, “Hello, it’s Fay. I hope you’re having a beautiful day …” has summoned back her infectious positive energy. She starts talking about how after the Dallas shooting, it lifted her spirit to see people of many races and walks of life marching together to protest the hate and the violence.

“I believe in quantum leaps in time,” she says, “and this could be a quantum leap of love if people wake up to the truth that we are all the same.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2016 at 5:30 AM with the headline "‘It breaks your heart’: KC mom on teaching her sons about racism."