For some black middle-class families in America, the video to surface out of McKinney, Texas, over the weekend was confirmation of something they have long been aware of: that regardless of income and postal address, as black bodies moving around in white-claimed spaces, they are constantly at risk of being seen as dangerous intruders, and that that perception may put them in danger.

Christopher Prater was in his dining room in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, on Sunday morning sipping coffee with his wife when he came across a video on Facebook of black teenagers in bathing suits in McKinney being chased down by police, thrown to the ground and threatened with a gun after they attended a pool party in the predominantly white suburb.

Minutes later, Prater was running up the stairs and rushing into the rooms of his two 12- and 13-year-old sons to wake them up.

The family gathered around the computer and Prater asked his sons to watch the video.

“They need to see it so they can learn, so that they can understand why I have been telling them they cannot behave like their white friends when they are out,” Prater told the Guardian.

“Put your head down and be quiet around white people in public. Be seen and not heard, and come home safely.”

Prater, a 39-year-old business owner who, together with his wife, decided to move his family back to the Detroit area three years ago after living in Atlanta, Georgia, for 13 years – in part to participate in the city’s economic redevelopment – is black, as are his wife and their three children.

Grosse Pointe Park, a wealthy suburb directly to the east of Detroit, is 85% white.

When making their decision about where to live when they moved back to Michigan, Prater and his family had to choose between two fears, he says.

The first option, moving to Detroit, which is 82% black, presented a fear his children would not have the best education in the city’s underfunded public school system, with the potential of some trouble after school.

The second option, to move to one of the many surrounding whiter, much wealthier suburbs where public schools are better in an American system that largely links public education funding to property value, presented Prater with the fear his children would be treated as intruders and unwelcome – a situation he feels has the potential to be deadly.

The Praters chose the latter option, but for the price of a better public education, the father of three has had to have conversations with his children about how to address police officers, how to behave at the corner store, at Starbucks, on a bike ride, and how to behave in their communal Grosse Pointe Park pool. And Prater does not just ask his children to be polite, he is preparing them for the worst.

“I have to tell them that with police officers it’s ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘yes, sir’. You give them a clear answer, you look them in the eyes.”

Obey commands, even if it’s not fair. Above anything else never answer back, he has had to teach them.

“That kind of behavior will get you killed nowadays,” he says, pointing out that one of his sons is now almost 5ft 11in, as tall as Trayvon Martin, the black 17-year-old who was shot dead as he walked home in a gated community in Florida in 2012.

Martin was killed by a neighborhood watchman who viewed his presence as “suspicious”. At the time of his death, the unarmed teenager was famously carrying fruit juice and a bag of Skittles.

According to data collected since the beginning of 2015 by the Guardian as part of its The Counted project, black Americans killed by police are twice as likely to be unarmed as white people.



This April, four black teenagers who were walking home from school in Grosse Pointe Woods, another nearby overwhelmingly white and wealthy suburb of Detroit, were reportedly shot at with pellet guns by two white men who shouted racial slurs from the windows of their home.

One of the two men then came out of the house brandishing a real gun, yelling at the teens to get off his lawn, despite the fact that they were not on his lawn, Indya Davis, one of the high school girls targeted in the incident, said in a local news report. The two men have since been arrested.

The Craig Ranch pool in McKinney where a police officer pushed a teenage girl in a swimsuit to the ground and pointed his gun at other teens. Photograph: John L Mone/AP

But Prater says that being frightened of the danger his black children will face when they walk around predominantly white neighborhoods – whether through interactions with policemen or residents – is not something that is restricted to suburban Texas, or suburban Michigan.

“It happens everywhere across America,” he says.

L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a professor of sociology and black studies at the City College of New York (Cuny), agrees.

In suburbs across the country, including McKinney, in Texas, and the various Grosse Pointes in Michigan (and all the suburbs in between), white people have been the historic benefactors and owners of space, he says.

As demographics shift in these suburbs, and black people increasingly move in, there is a struggle to maintain that power and ownership, he says.

In the case of McKinney, the fact that a white resident called the police after what appeared to them to be the worrying presence of too many black children in bathing suits in their communal pool space, after they had been invited to a birthday party, is ultimately about full citizenship and belonging, Lewis-McCoy said.

“Whenever you define who are legitimate in suburbs, black residents are excluded. For black families that means the suburbs will not save them. The issues that they have been dealing with in terms of racial profiling will follow them,” he says.

In the United States, the very creation of suburbs, a process that accelerated after the end of the second world war, was a racially exclusive, whites-only project.

“Across the United States, every suburb and every metro area was funded by the federal government through federal housing administration loans designed to be white-only communities,” Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute says.

“The federal housing administration subsidized the massive project to create suburbs on the condition that developers would sell to white homeowners only,” Rothstein stresses.

This explicit exclusion of African Americans from suburbs historically may have given white people, over the years, the idea of being the rightful and perhaps even natural owners of such spaces, Lewis-McCoy says. Police stepping in to protect them may then end up being the enforcers in maintaining such exclusions.

“Suburbia was a place that white folks ran to to run away from social problems,” Lewis-McCoy says. “But all they did was reify racial problems.”

Prater, the business owner, father and husband, says he is taken aback when he sees police officers in his majority white suburb of Grosse Pointe Park smiling with residents and throwing a football with them in their local park.

“As African Americans, our knee-jerk reaction when we see a police officer is to be afraid, but white people see them as protecting and serving them,” he says, pondering whether both perceptions may be accurate interpretations of opposing experiences divided along racial lines.

So Prater tells his children to never open a can of soda before they have paid for it when they are at CVS, even if they are in line, even if their white friends are doing it.

“These are not conversations I want to have with my children, but they are conversations I have to have, again and again and again,” Prater says.

“Every day I pray to God they never have to go through this.”