06/10/2026
How long, O Lord? How many times must we watch the same story play out and be expected to move on?
We grieve that we live in a world where our Black children must defend themselves. We grieve that Black children grow up in a world where they need to be prepared for the possibility that no one else may protect them.
We grieve that the system that was supposed to protect them turns around and prosecutes them. We grieve that they seat an all-white jury to weigh the worth of a Black child's life.
We know that in the room of Emmett Till’s trial, he couldn't defend himself. He was murdered, and the men who took his life sat before an all-white jury and walked free. That was 1955. We are still in that room.
We have watched store owners shoot Black children and walk. We have watched a man follow a young boy, start a confrontation, take his life, and then auction the gun he used to take it. We have watched the law extend its mercy in one direction. And when our people try to defend themselves, their bodies, their children, their dignity, their rights, the scales tip fast. The charges come. The grace disappears.
The research will tell you Black boys are perceived as older. Less innocent. More dangerous. As young as ten years old, this country looks at our children and decides they are something other than children.
If this had been the other way around, we already know the outcome would have been different. You know it. I know it. And that knowing is its own kind of grief.
So we lament. We lament that our children cannot move through the world freely. We lament that self-defense, for us, is not a right; it is a risk. We lament that defending ourselves, defending our family, defending our vote, defending our lives can still be reframed as aggression the moment Black hands are involved.
Scripture does not permit us to look away. Proverbs 11:1 calls a false balance an abomination to God. Not an inconvenience, not a concern, an abomination. That word belongs in this moment. Because what has been done, and continues to be done, to Black children in the name of justice does not please God.
