White Americans are insane about public parks

This thing happened when Frank was about ten or eleven, so I have to say it was twenty-five years ago? It was at his birthday party, at the end when most of the kids were gone. We had held it, as we held several of his brithday parties, at the public park on Oceanview Street, which already had a giant slide going down a hillside. In those days it was a better slide than it is now. Nowadays it is two narrow channels with stairs running up the hillside on both sides and in the middle, so only two kids can go down at once, and it has those gentle undulations which look like they are there to make the slide more fun but come to use it what they do is slow down the action and make them much much safer and somewhat less fun. In those days it was a broad expanse of steel, and kids went down it at some small risk but in cooperative groups and with much, much hilarity.

Anyway, Frank and his friends had spent the afternoon mostly sliding down that slide a,long with a bunch of other kids that were at the park. Nothing untoward happened, cake was eaten, and now most of the other kids in the park left. Some of them left behind some cardboard they had been using to enhance the slide. Frank and his last friends started using the cardboard. As I was packing our car a man entered the park and took the cardboard away, yelling at one of Frank's friends as he did so. By the time I got to the scene, the man was gone and my kids were standing around subdued.

The man had accused one of the three boys playing with the cardboard of stealing it. He hadn't yelled at all of the kids. Just one. Which one? You know which one. Jasmon, the black kid (who, I will just now say, was a great kid, who grew up to be an artist: and who, as my son noticed at that age, was always getting disproportionate prosecution from adults for normal kid behavior that the whoite kids got no grief for).

Okay, everything about this was insane. You noticed that. It was a piece of cardboard. Which the man's own kids valued so highly that they forgot it at the park. Now, good sliding cardboard is a nice thing, and I don't blame him for going back for it. But when three kids lick up a piece of cardboard lying unattended in the public park with the big slide and go sliding on it, that is not theft. A grownup can say "Sorry guys, but my kids want their cardboard back, thanks, bye." That's reasonable. A grouchy grownup who has spent too long in the sun in the park and really wants to go home and get some dinner and a beer can say "Taking back our cardboard now." Yelling at the kids who have the cardboard is out of line, and understandable. Assholish, but understandable.

Exclusively yelling at the only black kid in the park and accusing him of an actual crime is understandable too--it's racism. It's not, in this case, slapping a child and calling the police to manhandle them, but it's on the continuum and normalizes the latter.

I have no more time, or I'd tell the other story about my otherwise lovely mother-in-law. Later.