For most parents, “the talk” involves discussing the birds and the bees with your kids: safe sex practices, consent, bodily autonomy.
But as a new study shows, for parents of color, there’s a second talk that’s no less important to broach with kids at a certain age: “The talk” about how to safely conduct yourself when interacting with police officers so as to avoid arrest or physical violence.
Generally, “the talk” is timed around a teen getting their driver’s license. A parent might say: If you ever get pulled over, don’t talk back, put your hands on the dashboard, and ask if you can get your license and registration out before reaching for it.
Because police disproportionately target Black youth, most research on how and when “the talk” is given has focused on Black families. (Analysis by The Associated Press in 2021 showed that Black children make up more than half of the incidents of police using force on kids.)
Much less is known about whether parents in other groups also have these conversations. Ashley Jackson, an assistant professor at the school of social work at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, said she and her colleagues wanted to help close that gap.
“In our study, we found that those most likely to receive ‘the talk’ were Black, males and youth who’d experienced police contact,” Jackson told HuffPost.
“We also found that Black mixed-race youth who experienced intrusive police contact ― for instance, they’d been arrested, experienced police violence, or were searched or frisked — had higher odds of receiving ‘the talk,’” the professor said.
Compared with Black teens, white or Latino students had 59% lower odds of having “the talk.” Native American youth had 45% lower odds, while Asian youth had 71% lower odds of receiving “the talk” when compared with their Black peers.
When considering gender, girls had 36% lower odds than boys, but there was one interesting outlier, Jackson said: “We were surprised by our finding that Latinas also had a heightened likelihood of being given advice on how to navigate a police encounter than Latino boys.”
The need for “the talk” for children of color came into sharp focus in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racial inequities. The nationwide demonstrations, sparked by the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, forced a broader public reckoning with the dangers Black Americans face in encounters with law enforcement.
In a viral video posted on TikTok a week after Floyd’s death, one Black teen shared all the unwritten rules his mom made him follow when he left the house, including: If a cop stops you randomly and starts questioning you, don’t talk back, just compromise. Don’t touch anything you’re not buying. Don’t put your hoodie on. Don’t stare at a white woman.
Jackson and her team collected their data prior to Floyd’s death, from 2017 to 2019, in six school districts in St. Louis County, Missouri, where Jackson did her doctoral work.
But another instance of police brutality did loom over the study: The researchers found that teens who went to school in north St. Louis County ― which includes Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by police in 2014 ― were statistically more likely to have had “the talk” than students who attended schools elsewhere.
Students between the ages of 10 and 18 were surveyed at three different times over the course of the study. The racially diverse group was asked questions about their experience with police contact and whether their parents had spoken with them about what to do if stopped by the police. In total, 8,842 observations were recorded for 3,589 students.
‘The talk’ is still evolving for parents of color.
“The talk” has evolved with the times, but it remains a defining part of childhood for many Black children because of the persistent risk of them being harmed or killed in encounters with police or racist vigilantes.
The names of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown all loom large in these conversations: Each became a symbol of racial profiling and “adultification,” the tendency for Black children to be perceived as older, more threatening, and less innocent than they really are.
One 2014 study out of the University of California, Los Angeles, found Black youth are perceived as 4.5 years older than they actually are. (Research shows that Latina girls face similar adultification, which might be why parents are more prone to give them “the talk.”)
“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection. Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a professor of psychology and the lead author of that study.
Jackson, the author of this recent study, said Black families are often forced to protect their loved ones by engaging in “the talk” as a survival tactic.
“My own parents talked to my brother about what to do when encountering the police when he was just a child, so this topic certainly hits home,” she said.
There’s a similar conversation happening in immigrant households, with parents and other family members talking to kids about their fears about immigration officers in the community and possible deportation.
Jackson said she hopes to explore what “the talk” looks like among immigrant families preparing their children for possible interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
“Families are considering what to do if an ICE agent shows up at the front door,” she said. “Questions like: What should a youth do? What family member should they call? What steps should they take to ensure their own personal safety and the safety of their other family members?”
“This remains a highly understudied area, but examining this is crucial to unpack the real-life consequences of major shifts in immigration policy and its impact on the lives of immigrants and the larger community,” Jackson said.