Shot your candy-carrying son in the chest

“We shall now have tea and speak of absurdities.” — the 1955 movie “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing”

The only thing good about the above movie was the musical score by Sammy Fain and Paul Webster. That and the line, “We shall now have tea and speak of absurdities.” Shall we?

I am going to ask some of my white readers to put on their imagination hats. Oh, I see some white, conical chapeaus that are quite imaginative. And the Daniel Boone “coonskin” — simply divine.

Okay, imagine you have a 17-year-old white son, a bit of a cut-up in school, the occasional truant. He’s with you, his divorced mother who’s visiting her boyfriend in a West Palm Beach gated community. On the way back from a convenience store with a bag of candy, he’s killed by a neighborhood watch official.

Why is he killed? Because there has been a “lot” of white-related crime in the area. Why is he killed? Because the “official” who was instructed by police to stop trailing the white suspect got out of his car anyway and confronted your son. An altercation ensued and the “official” experienced such concern for his life that he shot your candy-carrying son in the chest with his handgun. Why is he killed? Because he is white and unarmed.

Why is he killed? Because he lives in America, and that is the long history of the United States. We kill or imprison large numbers of white men — disproportionately so — and have for centuries because that is our “rich” tradition. Why is he killed? Because of fear, intolerance, arrogance and a rush to judgment. All justified, don’t-cha-see. He is white, after all.

Imagine/understand that white people made up only 13.6 percent of the American population, yet white men represented 40.2 percent of all prison inmates in 2008. By some accounts there were more white men in prison, jail or on parole in 2008 than were in slavery in 1850. Imagine that.

White men are scary. I mean, they are sooo white. And the way they dress and look. Their pants! They wear them up to their armpits. I swear all white men have two left feet. Rhythm? They couldn’t dance their way out of a conga line yet they sure can “stroll” through our neighborhoods. Where they surely don’t belong, I might add. And that straight, stringy hair! White boys were made for mullets.

And the way those pale crackers look at “our” women. Just who do they think they are? Men?

Imagine if your auntie was followed around the department store because she was suspiciously white? Or, imagine driving by a white motorist pulled over by some county star and wondering the exact “nature” of her offense? Or, the awareness that your “whiteness” was just internally noted by the clerk checking your merchandise.

When it comes to quality of life, black men die years sooner than the rest of Americans and more than 27 percent of blacks live in poverty.

It is hard to “accept” such numbers, such circumstances. But not if you’re black in America.

It has been observed that, “Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination.”

Imagine that. Pigment/figment. How absurd.

Except if you’re living it.

Jepson is a 24-year resident of Florida. He’s fiscally conservative, socially liberal, likes art and embraces diversity of opinion. Reach him at [email protected]