June 26, 2026

On June 14, 2026, one-year-old Kohen Wiley was fatally shot by a police officer in Senatobia, Mississippi, after officers responded to a report of alleged shoplifting at a Walmart. According to news reports, police attempted to stop a vehicle connected to the call. During the encounter, an officer fired into the vehicle, striking Kohen while he was in the arms of his mother. An adult in the vehicle was also critically injured. The investigation is ongoing, and many questions remain unanswered.

An essay by historian and cultural critic Dr. Elwood Watson highlighted two competing realities. On one hand, there are facts still to be established. Body camera footage has yet to be released. The accounts offered by law enforcement and Kohen's family differ in significant ways. Those details matter and deserve careful scrutiny.  On the other hand, one fact stands apart from every disputed claim:  A one-year-old Black child is dead. 

Let that sink in.

As I sat with that reality, I realized my thoughts were moving in a different direction. I wasn't simply grieving the death of another Black child. I was thinking about what his death seemed to reveal once again—that even our youngest children are not consistently afforded the presumption of innocence, vulnerability, and protection that childhood is supposed to guarantee.

That realization felt painfully familiar.

***

In an instant, my mind traveled back eleven years to the summer of 2015. I could feel my chest tightening, and the grief and anger rising up in me as it did back then.

Like millions of others, I watched the now infamous video of Eric Casebolt, a police officer, violently restraining fifteen-year-old Dajerria Becton at a neighborhood pool party in McKinney, Texas. I remember watching in horror and disgust as he threw her to the ground, pinned her there, and treated her not as a frightened teenager but as someone who had forfeited the protections ordinarily afforded to childhood.

As the mother of two Black daughters, I wasn't simply witnessing another disturbing encounter between law enforcement and a young Black person. I was confronted with an unsettling realization:  She could have been one of my daughters.

That moment fundamentally changed me. It became the catalyst for creating #RacismIsASickness.

Eleven years later, reading about Kohen Wiley, I recognized that same feeling returning. The circumstances were different. The child was younger. The outcome was immeasurably more tragic.

But the question lingering beneath both encounters was painfully familiar: What does it say about our society when Black children are so often denied the grace, protection, and presumption of innocence that childhood is supposed to confer?

***

As I reflected on Kohen's death, I returned to a question that has stubbornly clung to me since 2015:  When does a Black child get to simply be a child?

Childhood is supposed to be a season of grace. We generally understand that children are dependent on the adults around them for care and protection. Society routinely extends children the benefit of the doubt because they are children. In other words, the presence of a child should have been enough to interrupt the use of deadly force.

Yet, time and again, Black children seem to occupy a different reality.

Their innocence is questioned more quickly. Inexplicably, their presence is perceived more readily as a threat. Their vulnerability is too often overshadowed by assumptions, stereotypes, and fear. Even when they are the youngest among us, they are not always afforded the protection that childhood itself is supposed to provide. I know the historical context for this, but that’s an essay for another day.

I don't know what the ongoing investigation into Kohen Wiley's death will ultimately reveal. I do know that his death has forced me to revisit a question that has remained unresolved for more than a decade:  What does it mean when Black parents cannot assume that their children's age alone will be enough to shield them from harm?

***

When I launched #RacismIsASickness in 2015, I hoped that over time the project would become less necessary.

I wanted to believe that the images, conversations, and collective acts of witnessing would eventually point toward a society moving closer to healing. That we would become more willing to confront racism not simply as individual prejudice, but as a condition capable of distorting our institutions, our perceptions, and our responses to one another.  That my fears for my children would be quelled by good faith efforts at dialogue that could pierce the veil on what motivated such ugliness and cruelty.

Instead, eleven years later, I’m here composing yet another essay because the question that confronted me while watching Dajerria Becton’s mistreatment still refuses to let go.

If Black children continue to encounter law enforcement without the assurance that their childhood will be recognized and protected, what has really changed?

I don't ask that question because I believe nothing has changed. I ask it because each new incident invites us to examine not only the actions of individuals, but the values reflected in our collective response. Do we instinctively protect Black children, or do we first search for explanations that make their suffering easier to accept?

Kohen Wiley's death did not create that question. It reminded me that it is still waiting to be answered.

***

I don't know whether my grandchildren will one day ask me about Kohen Wiley in the same way future generations ask about other defining moments in our nation's history. I hope they never have to carry stories like his as ordinary parts of their inheritance.

What I do know is that silence has never been an option for me.

That is why I continue to make photographs. Why I continue to write. Why I continue to create community spaces for dialogue. Not because I believe art alone can cure the sickness of racism, but because bearing witness is one way of resisting its normalization.

Every photograph I make, every essay I write, and every conversation I facilitate is rooted in a simple belief: Black children deserve to grow up in a society where their lives are regarded as precious, their humanity is unquestioned, and their childhood is protected—not conditionally, not selectively, but fully.

Kohen Wiley should still be here, y'all.  Like, damn!

His death deserves a thorough investigation. His family deserves answers. And all of us deserve to live in a society where no parent has to wonder whether their child's Blackness will overshadow their innocence in the eyes of those entrusted to protect them and us.

Until that day comes, I will keep asking the questions that first compelled me to create #RacismIsASickness eleven years ago, trusting that bearing witness is not the end of the work, but one necessary part of it.