Rickey Laurentiis

With the rest of the country, I find myself today inundated with a conveyor belt of images streaming from Baltimore, Maryland, the latest of which—a black mother, since identified as Toya Graham, seeming to attack, to literally tear her son away from the “riotous” front-lines—has recently gone viral. “Viral” may in fact be an apt term here, because it makes me so literally sick, and not just because this scene of a black mother and son in a tug-of-war can’t help but recall the mothers of so many other young black men. Sabrina Fulton, Lesley McFadden and the many, many others who had their mother-son bond disrupted by a bullet.