What If They Were White?
In 2020, something happened that should have stopped the country cold.
Firearms surpassed motor vehicle crashes to become the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States. Ages one through nineteen. Not soldiers. Not the elderly. Children.
It did not stop the country cold. The news cycle moved on. The legislative calendar stayed quiet. Because we stayed quiet. In recent years, over 4,400 of our youth have died annually from gunshot wounds, and while that number has fluctuated, firearms remain the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in America. A category of loss so consistent it has become, in the most devastating sense of the word, normal.
Let's jump back to what the title of this post is asking for a minute.
What if they were white?
Firearms have been the leading cause of death for Black children and teenagers in the United States for over two decades. Not since 2020. For over twenty years, a generation of Black children has grown up inside a statistic that most of America has never been asked to reckon with directly. I am asking you to.
For white, Hispanic, and Native American children, motor vehicle accidents held that grim distinction until 2020, when firearms overtook them across every demographic. The gap closed. The world started paying attention. But there is no way we could have known that. Is there? And still our nation’s response remained, absent is perhaps the better word.
But here is the question that the data alone cannot answer. Why, for two decades, was the leading cause of death for Black children in America not a national priority? Why did it not produce the sustained legislative urgency, the wall to wall media coverage, the collective grief that the loss of 4,400 children each year deserves?
The answer lives in the thoughts we dare not think, and the words we dare not utter. In the story we tell ourselves about whose loss is tragedy and whose is statistics. In the distance we maintain between ourselves and suffering that does not look like us.
The Whisper We Have Been Walking Past
In my book, The Whisper Before the Wave, there is a moment where the old man is asked to consider what we normalize in our lives, and why. Not what we intend. Not what we believe about ourselves. What we actually tolerate, quietly, consistently, without examining the cost.
We each should sit with that ask. For as long as it takes. Yes. It’s a lot easier to look the other way. But is that, really, what we want to do? Who we want to be, as a person, as a parent, as a country?
The normalization of gun violence in the U.S. is not normal. To speak plainly, its acceptance as it pertains to Black children is one of the longest running whispers in American public life. Has it been sustained through hatred? Yes. But not predominantly. That distinction belongs with distance. The simple and devastating human tendency to feel less urgency about suffering that does not penetrate our immediate world.
This is not an accusation. It is a description of how human attention works when it is not consciously directed otherwise. The amygdala responds to proximity and similarity. The brain registers threat most acutely when the threatened look like us, live near us, share our world visibly and daily. This is biology. But biology is not destiny. And in a democracy, it is not an excuse.
Because policy is not biology. Legislative priority is not biology. The decision about which children's deaths constitute a crisis worthy of urgent collective response is not biology.
That decision is a choice. And choices, made consistently over decades, become a culture.
The Weight of the Imagination
There is a reason the title of this post asks you to imagine rather than simply presenting the data. Data, at scale, produces a kind of numbness that is itself a form of distance. 4,400 is a number. A child is a person. Not a statistic. Not a color. Color does not define us. Our shared humanity, or lack thereof does.
So imagine, specifically, a child you love. Their age. Their particular laugh. The way they sleep. The thing they are afraid of and the person they are becoming. Now imagine that child is among the 4,400.
Something shifts in that imagination. Something that data alone cannot move.
That shift is the beginning of presence. The willingness to let another's reality land as if it were your own. Not guilt. Not performance. Presence. The quiet, radical act of actually feeling what is true rather than processing it from a comfortable distance.
The Whisper Available to You
This post will not solve gun violence. No single blog post has ever solved anything. No single whisper does a revolution make. But whispers accumulate. Attention, applied with intent and in the direction of common good, changes what a culture is willing to tolerate. And what a culture tolerates, eventually, becomes what its legislators permit.
Whether in the classroom or playground, the children dying from firearms in America are not dying because there are no solutions. They are dying because the collective whisper has not become consistent or loud enough to be heard. To become a wave of political will. A sea change, if you will.
You have a voice. A vote. A sphere of influence that extends further than you think. A conversation you could have differently. A silence you could refuse.
4,400 children a year is not normal. It has never been normal. And the first step toward making it stop is refusing to let it feel that way.
Let's Do Human Better.