Of Course America Justified The Police Killing Of A Black Baby [Op-Ed]

In September 1906, white mobs descended upon Black Atlanta and attacked hundreds of residents after the city’s white press manufactured and spread false allegations about Black men sexually assaulting white women. The vicious mob, which was aided by the police and state militia, dragged, beat, mutilated, and murdered at least 25 Black people in the streets. And amid the frenzy, a small Black child was reportedly thrown in the air and used for target practice.

The great intellectual and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois quickly returned to his home on the Atlanta University campus. That night, he sat on his front porch, armed and ready to protect his wife and his 5-year-old daughter from the mob. 

“I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot. If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived, I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass,” he said in his autobiography.

Du Bois knew what kind of white people were in that mob. He knew their bloodlust and degeneracy ran so deep that being a young child or a baby, innocent and helpless, offered no protection from racist vigilantes or police, who represented the same terror moving between the bedsheet and the badge.

One hundred and twenty years later, I wonder what Du Bois would say upon reading the latest news that Kohen Wiley, the one-year-old Black baby killed by police gunfire in Senatobia, Mississippi, this past summer. On Monday, the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office announced that the officer’s use of deadly force during an incident over alleged stolen diapers at a Walmart was “justified.”

A one-year-old baby. A bullet tore through his tiny torso. His skin was blasted with glass as his mother, who was unarmed and sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle, held him in her arms.

Justified. How?

The state will tell you that it accepted the police account that the moving vehicle posed an imminent threat to the officers, making the officer’s decision to fire at a mother holding a baby legally justified. But Du Bois would probably answer that question by repeating his famous lament that he gave 14 years after the Atlanta Race Massacre: “There is no place in this world for Black children.” 

Kohen was just one year old. His 20-year-old mother, Vellesiya Wiley, later told the Mississippi Free Press, “I watched my baby take his first breath, and I watched my baby take his last breath.” 

Can you imagine being a mother who has to utter a sentence that contains both ends of her child’s life? Could you keep doing the ordinary work of living while knowing your child’s entire existence fits between those two breaths?

Kohen’s grandmother said that in the days after the killing, Wiley was having panic attacks, crying every night, not eating or sleeping. The family has disputed the police account of what happened in that parking lot and has demanded the release of body-camera and surveillance footage. Even more disturbing, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation never interviewed the mother, and no state or local law enforcement official contacted the family about the attorney general’s decision. Kohen’s grandmother said the family learned of the decision on Facebook.

Of course this happened in America. 

Of course the police killing an innocent Black baby in his mother’s arms was found justified. Of course investigators never interviewed his traumatized mother. Because if you study American history, then the archives will show you that shooting a Black baby to death in his mother’s arms and the bureaucratic indifference to Black grief and trauma is an ancient white ritual. It’s a tradition so deeply rehearsed that it has become muscle memory, followed by its delicious absolution.

Kohen Wiley’s killing is not new and not an isolated horror. Three-month-old La’Mello Parker was killed by Mississippi police in 2021; one-year-old Legend Smalls was shot in the head by Houston police in 2021. America even kills the Black unborn too. In 2023, a pregnant Ta’Kiya Young was shot through her windshield, and a pregnant Charleena Lyles was killed in her own home when she called Seattle police for help. 

America has a long heritage of killing Black babies and justifying their murders. The Black press has documented infants and toddlers being shot out of their mothers’ arms, gunned down by the KKK and night riders during home invasions, killed while sitting in their fathers’ laps, shot during police raids while sleeping peacefully in their homes, and even being beaten, shot, burned, and sliced out of their pregnant mothers’ bellies.

Kohen Wiley is now part of that archive.

Predictably, because we live in a racist society that loves to debate whether unarmed Black children deserve to die, there have already been discussions about his mother and the driver’s actions, whether the car actually moved toward the police officer, and whether the officer truly feared for his life. Folks are acting like somewhere inside that pile of adult decisions we’re supposed to find a legitimate argument capable of making a bullet through a one-year-old baby’s chest morally intelligible. 

There is no plausible “adultification” argument for a one-year-old Black child. Kohen could not reasonably be mistaken for a grown man or hulking beast. His tiny body lacked the strength or criminal sophistication of an adult. At the end of the day, his childhood was not ambiguous, and his vulnerability was undeniably absolute. No police officer on earth could plausibly claim that he mistook a baby being held in his mother’s arms for an adult threatening his life.  

Black people might understandably be inclined, once again, to appeal to the language of childhood innocence in defense of this baby who was snatched from the future. That’s because we desperately want to believe there is some moral boundary that racism cannot cross. We keep pleading to a racist nation with a long history of degrading and murdering its young that our children are children, that they deserve empathy, tenderness, protection, and that they deserve to grow up. And they absolutely do.

But too often, we make this desperate appeal to white America as if it is suffering from a perception problem, or as if there’s a child-friendly version of white supremacy and all its evils. Repeatedly telling this nation, “Black children are children,” is not going to awaken a conscience that centuries of racial violence, and 2,000 more years of child-hating and killing in Europe that colonizers brought here with them, should have taught us not to presume. Black childhood innocence has never and will never reliably restrain white violence.

Kohen Wiley’s murder, which brings that contradiction into devastating focus, should call upon all of us to reject the comforting premise that recognizing Black children as children is the missing ingredient in protecting them. White America doesn’t refuse to see Black children as children. Instead, perpetrators of racial violence have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not uniformly obligated to respect our children, and are absolutely willing to destroy children it knows fully well are children.

Du Bois understood this 120 years ago. That’s why he sat on his porch with a shotgun to protect his daughter, not because he feared the mob might mistake her for an adult, but because he understood that those racists knew she was a little girl, and that might not stop them.