Growing Up on a Tightrope

When her sons were small, it was easy to keep up with their friends. Their friends had basketballs, they got basketballs. Their friends had snowboards, they got snowboards.

But the boys’ recent request gave Karen Stevenson pause.

The 12-year-old twins wanted paintball guns, the kind their private school buddies already owned. But their classmates are white, and the Stevenson boys are black.

“When I saw pictures [of paintball guns] on the Internet, my heart almost stopped,” Stevenson said. “My problem is, from a distance they look like real guns.

“The boys told me, ‘Why can’t we have one? Bobby has one.’ I had to tell them, ‘No one is going to mistake little blond-haired Bobby running around in his backyard with a paintball gun. But we’re black. We live in L.A. Somebody will think you’re running around with an AK-47.’ And I can’t afford to have somebody make that mistake.

“If you’re the mother of boys -- black boys -- in this city, that’s the kind of thing you have to think about.”

Stevenson, an attorney, lives comfortably with her sons in Baldwin Hills, a middle-class neighborhood in Southwest Los Angeles that, while not the suburbs, is certainly not the ‘hood. But she knows that privilege doesn’t equal protection.

Nationally, black teenage boys are five times as likely as white teen boys to be killed. In Los Angeles County, homicide accounts for two of every three deaths among young black men, compared with one in seven for whites, two in five for Latinos, and one in four for Asian Americans.

Here, gang warfare, demographic sprawl, long-standing racial tensions with police and the evolution of popular culture have made the threat both perniciously broad and particularly acute.

In high-crime neighborhoods, children grow up aware of the ambient presence of danger. They wear neutral colors to avoid being mistaken for gang members. They learn to duck at the sound of gunfire. Their worried parents order them straight home from school, make them stay off the streets and play inside.

For middle- and upper-class black parents, the tightrope walk is different. Their neighborhoods may be safer, their schools integrated, their children sheltered. But steering their boys through adolescence means keeping them tethered to uncomfortable realities of race.

Certainly, worries about the safety of adolescents are not the province of just black families or parents of boys. Car accidents kill more teens than anything else. More girls than boys today are trying drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. No parent is immune from the panic of a cellphone not answered, a curfew missed, a bout of teenage rebelliousness.

But raising black boys “requires a lot of additional sorting and interpreting, because you know they’re dealing with an environment that is fearful of them at best and hostile at worst,” says state Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a longtime black civic leader and the father of twin sons, now in college.

Regardless of a family’s class or education, many parents find the challenge of bringing young black males to adulthood safely “daunting,” Ridley-Thomas said. “When you look at the incarceration rates, dropout rates, crime rates -- particularly homicide, whether perpetrators or victims -- it is beyond unsettling.”

Indeed, a scroll through the statistics makes it clear why some black parents in Los Angeles feel their sons have targets on their backs.

In school, black boys are three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended and twice as likely to drop out.

On the streets, blacks are twice as likely as Latinos, and four times as likely as whites to be victims of violent crimes. National studies show that black teens commit 50% more violent crimes than whites.

They are also four times as likely to be arrested and seven times as likely to be locked up. If trends hold steady, almost one in three black boys growing up in Los Angeles today can expect to serve time behind bars.

Damaging stereotypes about young black men make employers reluctant to hire them, security guards shadow them at the malls and teachers are wary of them in class. Even civil-rights activist Jesse Jackson admitted that upon hearing footsteps behind him on the street at night, he is relieved when they don’t belong to young black men.

Los Angeles has one of the wealthiest concentrations of blacks in the nation, yet “the point of race is so fundamental and so compelling, you’re dealing with race over class,” Ridley-Thomas says.

The dilemma is not easy for parents to talk about. Black middle-class parents often work and socialize with whites, and are reluctant to publicly brand their adolescent boys as different from their nonblack peers. But privately, many obsess about the dangers of the differences.

Because of segregated housing patterns, black upscale neighborhoods often sprouted alongside lower-income, higher-crime districts. So every news account of an “innocent” victim -- the 13-year-old shot to death at a community carnival by gang members who mistook him for a rival; the teen killed while doing his homework when a recreation center was sprayed with bullets -- sets off a new round of shudders among those who live nearby.

In Los Angeles only about 45% of blacks live in predominantly black neighborhoods, compared with 70% of blacks across the country, setting up another problem.

The largest concentration of black wealth is in small hillside neighborhoods bordering the Crenshaw area -- Baldwin Hills, View Park, Ladera Heights -- “and almost nobody in those areas sends their kids to the local public schools, so those kids are scattered to the winds,” said West Los Angeles psychologist Bryan Nichols.

Blacks who migrate to the suburbs may land in places where “there’s not much connection to other middle-class black kids like themselves,” Nichols said. “So boys, particularly, draw their identity not from their community, but from hip-hop, rap or more impoverished neighborhoods. It has a lot more cachet in their world to say you’re from Compton than Ladera Heights.”

That leads some through a confusing struggle to secure their place among their peers, where the sheer fact of skin color makes it difficult to blend in.

“It’s hard to win,” Nichols said. “If you conform -- you’re going to class, getting A’s -- you’re a punk or a schoolboy, which is somehow saying you’re not authentically black.

“It requires an unusual level of social confidence -- which not everyone is going to have -- for them to successfully navigate their world.”

Nichols often sees boys in his practice whose rebellious behavior alarms and disappoints their middle-class parents. Parents’ fears are justified, he said. “If your kid is doing everything he’s supposed to do, he’ll probably be OK. But if he wanders into a gray area -- and teenagers live in those gray areas -- consequences can be so much worse than they might be for other kids.”

It is not only the raw odds that frighten black parents; their own personal experiences validate the numbers.

“Everybody has a family member or knows somebody’s who’s been locked up [or] who’s been murdered,” said Anthony Kelly, an Encino real estate developer who grew up in Compton and has a 12-year-old son.

His son attends a private school and splits time between his divorced parents, who both live in upscale neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley. But he ventures regularly into South Los Angeles -- to play basketball, visit family members, enjoy popular soul food restaurants.

“You don’t want your kid to not be around his people, to be in fear of his own,” Kelly said. “So you try to teach him to make good choices....

“But for every kid like mine, there are 10 other cats getting different messages. That’s why I worry about my son.”

When Kelly grew up in Compton, safety was largely a matter of knowing your “Bs and Cs” -- Bloods and Crips -- and steering clear of gang activity, he said.

Today, “gang members strike out in ways that defy logic, with no thought to who or when or where,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Earl Paysinger. “That makes it hard for young people to migrate from place to place.... There’s always that sense of risk.”

Teens are more mobile than their counterparts a generation ago. “When I was growing up, almost nobody had a car of their own,” said Paysinger, the highest-ranking black in the LAPD. “Now they have cars, cellphones.... They can range further away, with little oversight from parents.”

Black teenagers living in the suburbs often leave their neighborhoods to get to church, the barbershop, social clubs. “That takes them through places where their cars, dress and mannerisms may make them targets,” Paysinger said. “And they don’t have the experience to handle those situations.”

That kind of naivete worries Karen Stevenson. Her sons, like many boys their age, enjoy the antics of the rap music stars they watch on TV. But when Stevenson saw her son mimicking what he’d seen -- “he was doing something with his hands, pretending to throw down [gang] signs” -- she felt a scolding was in order.

“I had to tell him, ‘You cannot do that. This is not a joke in many parts of town.’ Something like that can get him shot.... That led to a difficult conversation. It’s hard for him to understand.”

The irony of their dilemma troubles many parents. “When we were growing up,” Stevenson said, “our parents’ challenge was to raise us to be successful in crossing over into a predominantly white world.

“Now here we are, our kids are very comfortable in that world. But we find we have to educate them about the nuances and gradations in the black community.”

Those nuances have changed as well.

Once, gang members could be identified by the way they dressed and carried themselves. Today, the popularity of rap music has made the gangster aesthetic sine qua non. In Los Angeles, the standard urban look for boys -- baggy pants, oversized T-shirts, earrings, baseball caps -- is as popular in the suburbs as in the inner city.

Gangs have even staked their claim to sports teams and popular name-brand gear. It is no longer enough to avoid Bloods red and Crips blue. Now, worried parents survey friends and scour the Internet to figure out whether a coveted pair of sneakers or a logo cap will make their sons targets of gangsters or thieves. Their sons must be taught to pay inordinate attention to their fashion choices.

On a recent visit home from college, Paysinger’s son was on the Harbor Freeway when a carload of young toughs pulled alongside his car and began glaring. He changed lanes, they changed lanes. He sped up, they sped up. He moved over again, they moved with him.

Alarmed, he grabbed his cellphone and called his dad, who talked him through a series of risky freeway maneuvers that sent him speeding down the exit ramp but got him safely home.

“My son couldn’t figure out why they had such interest in him,” Paysinger said. “I told him, ‘Take a look at that blood-red shirt you’re wearing.’ ”

Boys sometimes bristle at the restrictions -- at the notion that something so basic as the color of a shirt must be viewed through the prism of race if you’re black.

“We’ve argued over it a lot,” said Christopher Robinson, 22, who lives with his father, Brian, in North Hollywood. A baseball cap sparked a recent confrontation between father and son.

“We were going to visit his grandmother in Hawthorne, and Chris had on this red cap,” Brian Robinson recalled. “I told him, ‘Either you take it off, or you drive your own car. You’re not riding with me wearing that.’ ”

Chris refused to take off the cap. He wasn’t trying to make a statement, he said. “It’s just that my hair wasn’t combed.... I was only going to my grandmother’s house. I didn’t see how whatever I wore was going to put me in some kind of danger.”

Neither would give in, so they drove separately.

Chris thinks his father is a worrywart. “I get his point: That I already have a couple strikes against me by being young and black, and I shouldn’t draw attention to myself. But I’m not going to let his fears stop me from living my life.”

“It’s frustrating,” adds his father, a juvenile probation officer. “I tell my son, ‘I trust you, but you see that all these things can happen.... If you don’t get [trouble] from your peer group, you can get if from the cops.’ ”

Driving While Black, as the offense is colloquially known, is no joke to black parents. Growing up, Anthony Kelly recalls, “on a daily basis ... we had police pulling us over at random.”

Today, young black men still complain they are routinely stopped by law enforcement. Statistics seem to bear them out. According to a recent university study, black drivers are twice as likely as others to be stopped by Los Angeles police and four times as likely to be searched, though they were less likely than any other group to be found with contraband.

Kelly is already contemplating the day his 12-year-old gets behind the wheel. “I’m going to put a college plate on the back of his car,” he says, “so they know he’s not out looking for trouble.”

But parents also recognize their boys face a more insidious threat, one more difficult to steer around: A youth culture that celebrates violence and aggression, and has as its archetype angry dark-skinned young men.

“This is a time in our society when what’s black culture and what’s street culture has become very confused,” says Ellis Cose, author of several books about race and class. “Every kid wants to be cool, and there’s an additional burden on middle-class black kids.

“I know prep school kids who get approached and asked about the Crips and Bloods. Black kids are expected to reflect street culture.... That’s easy for a boy to buy into.”

Kelly is mindful of that temptation. He wants his son to understand that the identity of a young black man is not vested in income, appearance or manner of speech. That’s why he drives his son to South Los Angeles every week to play on a basketball team with the sons of Kelly’s childhood friends -- from investment bankers to ex-cons.

But sometimes the lesson is not what he intends. “There’s a 15-year-old kid that ... hangs out with my son. So I bought the kid some Jordans [popular basketball shoes]. And he’s playing basketball at a junior high in Westchester when a car pulls right onto the grounds and a guy takes the kid’s shoes at gunpoint. Nice school, nice neighborhood ... a 15-year-old gets a gun pulled on him.

“Now what do I tell my son? You realize it’s not enough to move a kid out of an environment, it’s changing the environment where we’re from. I know the danger to him is most likely to come from another young black man.... That’s not something we can run away from.

“How many cultures can you say that when a guy turns 25, he actually celebrates because he didn’t think he would make it?”

Kelly knows some people might mock his fears. The odds of something happening to his son are like a plane falling out of the sky, they think.

“But for me,” Kelly says, “what I see when I look around ... planes are falling out of the sky all the time.”