opinion

Kevyn Orr: Stop putting our black children at risk

Kevyn Orr and I talked lots of times over his tenure as Detroit Emergency Manager, but it was normally about the city's finances.

But Tuesday, when I interviewed him for the Detroit Economic Club, I tossed in a question about race, and last year's disturbing incidents in which white police officers killed unarmed black men and boys.

If anyone has realized the heights of the American Dream, it's Orr. A top-notch education led him to extraordinary job opportunities and he's now one of the nation's most respected and sought-after bankruptcy attorneys. He's wealthy, and able to craft a world that's largely insulated from the dangers or even inconveniences most Americans -- black or white -- confront.

But his answer to my question shows how complex and tenacious racial dynamics can be in this country. No, Orr's success and wealth don't shield him -- or, more important, his son -- from the tentacles of racism.

That's not a shock to me. But Orr's candor and his detailed explanation of the ways he must deal with racial barriers is worth a read (the transcript is below) and a thought about progress and the road to equality that is still untraveled.

Thanks to WDET-FM (101.9) for sharing the audio for this transcript. Listen to my conversation with Kevyn Orr in full Wednesday at 9 a.m. on WDET's "Detroit Today."

Stephen Henderson: You and I have talked many times about race and particularly about the events last year with police killing unarmed African American men. You're raising an African-American boy in Maryland. Tell me about how that resonates with you.

Kevyn Orr: It resonates with me from when I was a kid and would get stopped. When you're a kid, young black kid, you want to be a cop. You want to wear the uniform that all young kids do and you wave at officer friendly. Turn 12 or 13 and that starts to transition. And when you start driving, it really transitions because people start stopping you. …

I've always said there are three things I have to tell my young son. I have to teach him what the meaning of the N-word is. He's going to hear it in a hostile way.

I have to teach him how to speak cop. How to use proper diction. Never put himself in a position where he is considered disorderly because once you do that anything can happen. It can escalate as it just did in Yale. Young black kid this past weekend had a gun put to his head by the Yale police force as a Yale student in New Haven…

And third, I have to teach him why many of the friends that he's growing up with, he's known since nursery school since he was two or three, some of them -- parents cousins, uncles or aunts -- at some point are going to say: 'You know, maybe you don't want Kevyn to go with you to the prom or to the dance. Maybe that's not an appropriate thing.' So those things happened to me when I was born in 1958. Here we are 56 years later and I've still got to cycle through that with my kid.

What I would say is two things: One, I have many friends who are in law enforcement and on police. Some of my dearest friends are policemen. They have a very hard job. We don't see what they see. We don't see them rolling to a job and seeing a 5-year-old child being sexually assaulted by a stepfather. We don't see them rolling up and trying to understand why someone was killed for a pair of tennis shoes at 13 years or a drive-by shooting takes the life of a 2-year-old in a playground. We don't see that.

By the same token, I hope there's an honest discussion that they need to understand I love my child just as much as my white groomsmen do love their children. I work very hard for him to have the same opportunities that their kids do.

And I don't want him to line up on a slab because somebody rolled up on an incident at a playground where he had a pellet gun and shot him in two seconds. That is a concern I have even as me, that other people have. And we have got to have a dialogue about that to cycle through this problem. Another 56 years should not pass where we're putting young black children at risk.