September 4, 2026

On June 26, I published an essay asking a question I wish I had never had reason to ask: When does a Black child get to simply be just a child?

I wrote it less than two weeks after one-year-old Kohen Wiley was killed during an encounter between police officers and members of his family outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi.

At the time, there was much we did not know about what had happened. An investigation was underway. Accounts of the encounter differed. Questions about the actions of the officers involved remained unanswered.

I didn't want to speculate about those questions then, and I don't want to do so now.

My concern was Kohen. He was only one-year-old.

Whatever circumstances brought the adults around him into contact with police that day, Kohen had no responsibility for them. He was not a suspect, or a threat. He was not someone from whom better judgment, greater caution or compliance could reasonably be demanded.

He was a child.

When I consider all the ways Black children are denied the uncomplicated status of childhood—how quickly innocence can be replaced by suspicion, vulnerability by perceived threat, and the expectation of protection by an expectation that Black children somehow participate in keeping themselves safe—I get angry, and then I become sad.

In “Reflecting on Kohen Wiley,” I asked when a Black child gets to simply be just a child because I wanted to insist upon something that should require no argument at all: Black children possess inherent worth. Their lives are valuable. Their vulnerability matters. They deserve protection.

In the months since Kohen's death, however, new information has emerged about the Senatobia Police Department and some of the people entrusted with its authority.

That information has brought me back to Kohen.

But this time, I am going to pose a different question:  If we believe Black children are worthy of protection, what does that belief require of the institutions given power over their lives?

Or, perhaps more urgently:  What does a community owe itself so that another Black child doesn't die at the hands of one of its institutions?

*****

In the weeks after Kohen's death, the questions surrounding the Senatobia Police Department did not subside. They deepened and became more complex.

Sgt. Hunter Foster, the officer who allegedly shot little Kohen, remains on administrative leave as the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigation continues. Reporting also revealed that days before Kohen was killed, a Black officer had filed an internal complaint accusing Foster of repeatedly using racially offensive language toward him.

Then attention turned to the man leading the department.

In August, Mississippi Today published private text messages by Senatobia Police Chief Harold Vanderford in which he repeatedly used racial slurs, including the n-word. Vanderford acknowledged sending the messages but rejected the characterization of himself as racist.

The revelation was disturbing enough on its own.

But the context in which Vanderford had become police chief made it even more difficult to dismiss as simply another story about a public official caught saying reprehensible things in private.  In 2023, Senatobia attracted national attention after police arrested a 10-year-old Black boy who had urinated behind his mother's car in a parking lot. The incident damaged an already complicated relationship between the police department and members of the city's Black community. The police chief at the time ultimately resigned.  Vanderford became his successor.

He stepped into leadership of a department that needed to rebuild trust with the Black community. Yet the man entrusted with helping move that relationship forward was privately using racial slurs and disrespectful language that raises serious questions about what he actually believed about some of the very people whose trust his department needed to regain.

On August 25, Senatobia's Board of Aldermen initially voted to allow Vanderford to remain chief. Days later, after continued public pressure and calls for accountability, Vanderford submitted his resignation. On September 1, the board rejected that resignation and instead voted unanimously to fire him.  His firing may have answered one immediate question about whether he should continue leading the Senatobia Police Department.

It did not answer the question that interests me more:  How did he get there in the first place?

What did Senatobia look for, and more importantly what did it overlook, when it determined that Harold Vanderford was fit to lead its police department? What did the city understand rebuilding trust with its Black residents to require? And what, if anything, was done to determine whether the person being entrusted with that responsibility believed that those residents deserved to be treated with the dignity and humanity that responsibility demanded?

The same questions become difficult to avoid as more information emerges about Foster and the institutional response to complaints concerning his conduct.

I am not suggesting that the racist language attributed to people within the Senatobia Police Department proves that racism caused Kohen Wiley's death. The investigation into his death must establish what happened, and conclusions about an officer's actions should rest upon evidence.

I am asking something else:  What did the system fail to look for when it entrusted these men with public authority, and how did that failure lead to further damage of the fragile relationship between law enforcement and the Black community in Senatobia?

Because by the time a police chief's racist private communications become public, by the time an officer's conduct becomes the subject of investigation, and certainly by the time a child is dead, we are no longer talking about prevention, healing and rebuilding trust.

We are talking about what happens after something has already gone terribly wrong.  

*****

There is an obvious difficulty in asking why Senatobia allowed this to happen, because I’m not sure I can say that it did “allow” it to happen.  Look, people do not necessarily announce the beliefs they know might prevent them from getting what they want.

A candidate for police chief is unlikely to sit before the people responsible for hiring him and volunteer that he regularly uses racial slurs in private conversations. A prospective police officer who harbors contempt for Black people is unlikely to declare that contempt openly when answering a question about racial bias.

But that cannot be where the inquiry ends.

We already accept the premise that some things about a person's character, judgment, temperament and history are relevant to whether that person should be entrusted with police authority. Law enforcement agencies conduct background investigations. Applicants may undergo psychological evaluations, reference checks, drug screenings and other assessments intended to determine whether they are fit to carry a badge, a firearm and the authority of the state.  Why, then, would someone’s beliefs about the humanity of the people they will take an oath to serve and protect be treated as somehow separate from that determination?

I am not talking about policing thoughts.  I am talking about fitness for public trust.

If someone believes Black people are inherently more dangerous, less intelligent, less credible, more criminal or less deserving of dignity than other people, those beliefs do not necessarily remain safely contained inside that person's head. Beliefs influence perception. Perception influences judgment. And police officers make judgments that result in consequences most of us will never have the authority to impose on another human being.  

They decide who appears suspicious…Who appears threatening…Whose account of an encounter seems credible…Who deserves patience…When a situation requires escalation…When force is necessary…And sometimes, whether another human being represents a threat to someone's life.

That makes the racial worldview of a person seeking police authority relevant to the question of whether that person is fit to possess it.  The problem, of course, is determining how we know.

“Are you racist?” is not much of a screening question. Someone can lie. Someone can know and say exactly what an interviewer wants to hear. Someone can sincerely believe that they are not racist while holding and nurturing private beliefs about Black people that suggest otherwise.

The revelations about Harold Vanderford make that problem particularly difficult to ignore.The public-facing version of Vanderford was apparently acceptable to the people who entrusted him with leading Senatobia's police department. The city must have been comfortable with this version of Vanderford when assessing his qualifications. Nothing they discovered prevented him from becoming chief.

The private communications revealed years later showed something else.

And friends, that discrepancy matters.

It suggests that the absence of openly expressed racism cannot be treated as evidence of the absence of racism, particularly when someone knows that openly expressing those beliefs could cost them access to the position they seek. And with all that we know about the pipeline of white supremacist groups to the halls of governmental power, assuming otherwise is a foolish errand.

So perhaps the question should not be whether we can devise a perfect test capable of identifying every racist person who applies for a position of public trust.  We cannot, nor should we even try.  The more useful question is whether we should ultimately decide that this particular dimension of fitness is important enough to become substantially better at assessing it.

What questions do we ask?

What histories do we examine?

What patterns of behavior matter?

How deeply do we investigate previous complaints?

What do former colleagues say?

How has someone responded when confronted with racial discrimination or misconduct?

What happens when troubling information emerges after that person has already been hired?

And perhaps most importantly, what weight must we give these things when they conflict with other qualifications we have traditionally considered more important?

Because racial equity cannot be treated as a desirable personality trait for someone entrusted with public authority. It cannot be the soft skill listed somewhere beneath experience, education, leadership ability and professional competence.

In a community attempting to repair a damaged relationship between law enforcement and its Black residents, it is part of professional competence, which makes Senatobia's experience especially difficult to comprehend.

The city had already been warned.  A Black child had already become the center of a national controversy involving its police department. Trust had already been damaged. The need for repair was already known.  And yet the man ultimately entrusted with leading that repair was himself sending racist messages in private.

That leaves me with a question much larger than whether Senatobia made a bad hire:  What happens when an institution recognizes the damage racism has caused but still lacks—or fails to create and use—the mechanisms necessary to prevent racism from inside that institution again?

Since 2015, I have described racism as a sickness.

Perhaps it is time to take that metaphor more seriously.

*****

Racism is a sickness.

It is a statement, a line in the sand, and a metaphor that has sometimes made people uncomfortable.

Over the years, I have encountered resistance to it from Black and white people alike, although not always for the same reasons.  Some have heard “racism is a sickness” and assumed that describing racism this way absolves racist people of responsibility for their behavior. If racism is an illness, the argument goes, then perhaps the racist person becomes the patient rather than the perpetrator—someone who should be treated rather than held accountable for the harm they cause.  

Others have interpreted the metaphor almost exclusively through treatment. Racism exists. Someone behaves in a racist manner. Harm occurs. Then we intervene.

Neither interpretation has ever reflected what I mean.

I have always understood the metaphor through the logic of public health, which is not activated when someone becomes critically ill. It begins much earlier, with the work of understanding where threats exist, how they spread, who is at risk, what conditions allow them to flourish and what can be done to prevent harm before treatment becomes necessary.

There is surveillance, prevention, detection, intervention and treatment.  And when harm has occurred, there is recovery.  Most importantly, these steps aren’t activated after someone has been harmed.

That distinction matters when thinking about racism inside institutions.

If racism is a sickness, then waiting until someone commits an unmistakably racist act is not prevention. Waiting until a complaint becomes a scandal is not prevention. Waiting until private messages become public is not prevention. Waiting until an officer's behavior results in suspension or termination is not prevention.

And waiting until someone is dead certainly is not prevention.

For years, I have wondered what would happen if we began using the metaphor of racism as a sickness as a framework for prevention, detection, intervention, treatment and recovery from racialized harms done in institutional contexts.  What would we do differently if our objective were not simply to react to racist harm, but to interrupt the conditions that allow racism to acquire institutional power in the first place?

During the national reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, I grappled with these and other questions.  

Among the demands that emerged was the call to “defund the police.” The phrase encompassed different proposals, including reducing police budgets, reallocating public resources toward community services and, for some advocates, dramatically reducing the role of policing itself.

I understood the anger driving the demand. I understood the refusal to continue pouring public money into institutions responsible for recurring harm.  But I remained uncomfortable with the idea that funding itself adequately powered the infection.

Certainly, not paying officers who abuse their authority does not solve anything. Neither does continuing to fund institutional practices that produce or protect harm.

But if racism is a sickness, reducing the resources available to an institution does not necessarily detect racism inside it, prevent racist people from acquiring authority, identify warning signs once they are there, or determine what should happen when those signs emerge.

A department with a smaller budget can still incubate the same infection.

The question I kept returning to was not simply how much money police departments should receive.  It was what we expected those institutions to do with the problem once we acknowledged that racism existed within them, and how money weakened or strengthened any potential solutions.  And one recurring feature of American policing made that question especially troubling.

Officers fired or forced out of one law-enforcement agency have sometimes been able to obtain employment with another. Researchers have referred to them as “wandering officers”—officers whose misconduct ends their employment in one jurisdiction without necessarily ending their careers in law enforcement.  Viewed through a public-health framework, the problem becomes immediately apparent.  Removing someone from one department may protect that department—and the communities it serves— from further harm by that individual.  But if the person can simply move to another jurisdiction, acquire another badge and resume exercising police authority rooted in racial animus against a group, the underlying risk has not necessarily been eliminated; it has merely been relocated, putting members of that community in harm’s way. 

That is the difference between responding to a symptom and interrupting transmission.  And it is why firing someone, however justified, cannot always be mistaken for treatment.  Neither can suspension, resignation, a lawsuit that is settled out of court, or a public apology after the damage has been done.  

For sure, these and other actions may be necessary responses to particular harms. Accountability matters. And so do consequences.  But treating the perpetrators of racism is not the same thing as treating racism.  A public-health framework asks us to look upstream and downstream at the same time.

What would surveillance look like—not surveillance of Black communities, which have experienced more than enough of that—of the institutional conditions in which racial harm repeatedly occurs?

What would meaningful screening look like before someone is given public authority?

How would we detect evidence of racial animus once someone is inside an institution?

What interventions should occur when warning signs appear?

What constitutes treatment when racism has become embedded not merely in an individual but in the practices, culture or leadership of an institution?

What does recovery require after trust has been damaged?

And how do we continue monitoring the institution so that recovery does not become another word for forgetting?

These questions expand responsibility where inadvertently, actions were taken that absolved bad actors of responsibility.  They ask us to account not only for the person who ultimately causes harm, but for the systems that hired them, empowered them, supervised them, received complaints about them, disciplined or failed to discipline them, and sometimes allowed them to carry the same authority somewhere else.

Which brings me back to Senatobia.

What would happen if, instead of waiting for the next revelation, the next firing, the next investigation or the next dead Black child, we treated evidence of racism within an institution entrusted with public safety as a threat to public health (not just public safety) in its own right?

*****

I do not know what an effective system would ultimately look like for preventing racism from infecting the corridors and people holding institutional power. I do not know whether there is a reliable way to determine what someone truly believes about Black people before placing a badge on their chest or putting them in charge of a police department.

I am skeptical that there is one test, one interview question or one training program capable of doing that work.

But I am equally skeptical of the idea that because the work is difficult, that the most effective way of dealing with an incidence of racial animus should occur only after someone has been harmed.

That is where Senatobia presents a question worth pursuing.

What would have happened if the city had approached its damaged relationship between law enforcement and its Black residents as something requiring a prevention strategy as well as repair?  After the 2023 arrest of a 10-year-old Black boy brought national attention to the department, what would it have meant to treat that incident not merely as a controversy to move beyond, but as information?

What did it reveal about the institution?  What did it reveal about the relationship between the department and the community?  What risks had become visible?  And what should that knowledge have changed about the process of evaluating qualifications of the next person entrusted with leading the department?  These questions become even more urgent when applied to what happened after people were hired.

If an officer uses racially offensive language toward a Black colleague, what should happen next?  Who needs to know?  What is the trigger point for handling an allegation?  What additional information should be examined? At what point does a pattern become visible?  And when does evidence of racial animus become relevant not merely to whether an employee has violated workplace policy, but to whether that person should continue exercising police authority over the public?

Those are questions of detection and intervention.

Treatment raises another set of questions:  What exactly are we attempting to treat?  If the problem resides primarily with an individual, perhaps the appropriate response involves discipline, retraining, reassignment, suspension or removal, depending upon the nature and severity of the conduct.

But what if the institution itself has created conditions in which racial misconduct is ignored, minimized, normalized or protected?  Removing one person cannot treat an organizational culture.  Neither can replacing the person at the top. If any municipality knows this, it should be Senatobia.

One police chief left after an encounter involving a Black child damaged public trust. Another chief was brought in to lead the department forward. Three years later, a Black child is dead, that chief has been fired following the exposure of his racist private communications, and the community is once again being asked to consider what accountability and repair should look like.

At some point, replacing individuals without examining the environment that should perhaps adapt an expansive and thorough screening of candidates in line to acquire and exercise authority becomes insufficient.

And then there is recovery.

It is tempting after a crisis to begin talking about healing, unity and rebuilding trust.  But trust is not something an institution can request from the people it has harmed. Trust has to become earned after accountability is taken.  Full stop.

For Black residents of Senatobia, what would make trusting their police department a rational choice rather than an act of faith?

Perhaps that requires greater transparency about hiring and disciplinary practices. Perhaps it requires stronger mechanisms for reporting misconduct and protecting the people who report it. Perhaps it requires meaningful community participation in selecting police leadership. Perhaps it requires better systems for identifying officers with histories of misconduct before they move from one department to another.  Perhaps it requires forms of racial-bias assessment we have not yet developed.  

Or maybe it requires courage to start nudging the process in a new direction, asking the right questions without fear of offense or retaliation.  

I don't know.  Whatever the uncertainty points to, it’s past time for us to pursue clarity and more precise strategies. 

Because the alternative is painfully familiar: wait for harm, investigate what happened, discover what was missed, remove whoever can no longer remain, promise change and begin rebuilding trust until the next incident reveals what the previous response failed to address. (While understanding that the “vector” of this infection may pick up and move to another department!)

That is not the kind of prevention we need now. We’re looking at a cycle that is profoundly broken.   And breaking that cycle will require more than finding better ways to respond after racism has done its damage. It will require institutions willing to ask what kinds of information need to be gathered earlier, what they can detect sooner, when they should intervene and what genuine treatment and recovery demand.

Which brings me back to another question that has emerged while watching the developments in Senatobia unfold:  What does a community owe itself so that another Black child doesn't die at the hands of one of its institutions?

I don't think Senatobia is the only community that needs to answer it.

And I don't think law enforcement is the only institution to which the question applies.

*****

When I first wrote about Kohen Wiley in June, I kept returning to his age.  He was only one year old.  Alive for 12 short months.  365 days.

There is something about those numbers that strip away every excuse we have become accustomed to hearing when Black people are harmed during encounters with law enforcement.

As one year old, Kohen could not have made a better decision.

As a twelve-month-old, he could not have followed instructions more carefully.

Having only lived 365 days, he could not have made himself appear less threatening.

He could not have kept his hands where an officer could see them, spoken more respectfully, moved more slowly or remained more still.

He could not have done anything differently.

He was only one year old.

That is why I asked when a Black child gets to simply be just a child.

Months later, I am still asking, but I understand the question differently now.

It is one thing to insist that Black children possess the same innocence, vulnerability, worth and humanity as every other child.  We cannot place the burden of safety on the child and call that prevention.

It is another thing to build institutions that behave as though we actually believe it.  If Black children are truly allowed to simply be children, then protecting them cannot primarily be their responsibility. We cannot continue preparing Black children to survive institutions and their racist representatives/agents/actors while remaining unwilling to examine whether the people entrusted with power inside those institutions should have that power to do harm in the first place.

And when harm occurs, we cannot allow accountability for what happened yesterday to substitute for responsibility toward the children who are still here tomorrow.

Yes, Kohen’s family deserves answers.  They deserve the truth.  The people of Senatobia deserve to know what happened and why.

But the children who may encounter that police department tomorrow deserve something, too.  They deserve adults willing to ask difficult questions before another family has a reason to ask them afterward.  They deserve institutions capable of recognizing warning signs before those signs become casualties.They deserve communities willing to understand prevention as an expression of their worth.

Since 2015, I have said that racism is a sickness.  And you know what?  I still believe that.

And perhaps one of the most consequential things we can do with that metaphor now is stop waiting until people who have been infected by racism through their families or hate groups or whom/whatever have injured or killed someone before deciding that its presence requires our attention.

Surveillance, prevention, detection, intervention, treatment, recovery… it all matters because these are mechanisms of accountability to a community that deserves to heal. Reacting to tragedy through half-hearted attempts to get to the heart of what happened, cannot bring a dead child back to life.

If we truly believe that Black children are worthy of protection, then our responsibility to them must begin before we know their names because something terrible has happened to them.

Kohen Wiley was one year old. Damnit, he should have had an entire childhood ahead of him.

So perhaps it’s no longer only about asking when a Black child gets to simply be just a child.  Perhaps we must also ask what we are willing to change to make sure that child gets to grow up, healthy and unharmed by the community that was supposed to protect them.