Black boys, even the youngest and most vulnerable ones, continue to be endangered in this nation

I keep thinking about a video on social media showing a nighttime encounter between a Black boy and members of the Philadelphia Police Department in Center City. The child couldn’t have been much older than 10 or 11. It’s cold, and instead of a coat, he’s wearing just a T-shirt. He was walking through Dilworth Plaza on the west side of City Hall all by himself. When an officer approaches, his hands go up immediately.

It’s hard to make out exactly what all was being said on the video, but at one point the cop tells him to “get on the train and go home.” The boy disappears into the darkness, leaving behind all kinds of questions.

Why was he out by himself at night? Why didn’t the cops see to it that the boy made it home safely? Why would they assume he had train fare? Or that he even had a safe home to go to?

The officers standing around that night could have made a positive difference in a child’s life. Instead, they failed that kid.

In another part of the country and on a far more drastic scale, law enforcement also failed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, who was killed in a police-involved shooting in June. That incident began when an employee at a Walmart in Senatobia, Miss., notified police officers who were at the store on another matter about two women who were seen running from the entrance.

According to a recently released video, the cops gave chase and approached the women’s car with their weapons drawn. The vehicle reversed, hit a car, and then drove forward, appearing to move toward one of the officers. An officer fired into the passenger side of the car.

Baby Kohen was sitting on his mother’s lap in the front passenger seat when the bullet ripped into his torso and exited the other side of his body.

He died because someone said his mother and her friend might have stolen baby items. A life lost because of some damn diapers.

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Mississippi being Mississippi, officials called the officer’s use of force justified.

The cops failed that kid.

Same thing with the 3-year-old soccer whiz who was caught on video dribbling the ball and playing as skillfully as a much older child in a match that took place in Winter Park, Fla., on Saturday.

Some onlookers couldn’t handle it, accusing the 3-year-old of attention-seeking and calling for the league to remove him from the game. There was some back-and-forth, and authorities were eventually summoned. According to a police report, “the parents were upset that their child was being scorned for playing to [sic] well and was being taken out of the game.”

Pictures of Nevada’s confused little face afterward break my heart.

“At just 3 years old, Nevada could not understand why he was being taken away from a game he loved,” his mother, Martasia Griffin, wrote on a GoFundMe she created to help fund her son’s soccer journey.

Luckily, the situation didn’t escalate.

But the fact that the police even showed up on the scene of something as minor as a soccer match disrupted by one tiny Black boy’s skill at a sport is disturbing.

We know from history that justice isn’t always served when it comes to Black children. Black boys, even the youngest and most vulnerable ones, are endangered in this nation.

This kind of thing goes way back.

It’s well-documented how police routinely engage in the adultification of Black children — habitually assuming Black boys and girls are older than they are, and failing to see them as adolescents — which is what may have happened with the youngster walking around Center City at night on his own. That could be why instead of helping the boy get home, they allowed him to go off by himself.

Tamir Rice was only 12 and playing with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland when a police officer shot and killed him. That officer in 2014, like the one who killed the 1-year-old in the car outside Walmart in Mississippi, was never criminally charged.

Kohen’s 2nd birthday would have been Nov. 1. He would be here if that cop hadn’t opened fire.

He and all of our Black boys deserve to be protected; they deserve a chance at a full childhood, and they deserve something resembling justice. Instead, they’re too often treated like a threat and forced to grow up far too soon — if they have a chance to do so at all.