"Had the Joneses understood the ways of the white folks in charge of the justice system, even on a local level, there is no way Peri [the mother] would have advised Marcus to be cooperative with police and "tell them anything they wanted to know," even without an attorney in the room."
I think Yoshie is right that the issue is racism rather than bad parenting and I don't much like Wise's slant in this article. While I agree with his judgement of racism in the US, it seems odd to blame fuzzy...liberal parents for their son's tragedy and to focus so much of the article on that. (In some odd and covert way, Wise often seems to be advocating some kind of necessary segregation.)
For one thing, all parents walk a thin line in cautioning their children about potential dangers. You want to give them a picture of "reality," but you don't want them to be afraid to live, you don't want them to think that their gender or their race or their youth identifies or defines them as victims.
I have definitely cautioned my son about cops and about the need to be extremely respectful and calm around them. So far, it has worked. I also told my kids (when they were little) that if they get lost they should ask a woman to help them, not a man. Then there was the holy gospel of birth control...but otherwise, I probably held back a lot. Or tried to.
My daughter is ten. She already knows about sex, but she is not very savvy about adolescent and grownup male sexual aggression and other asshole behavior. How much to tell her is not that easy to figure out. I want her to know that there are real dangers, but I don't want her to be scared and I don't want her to perceive herself as a woman in the perspective of such behavior. (She will be about 5'11" in a few years and that will help a lot.)
I think the parents in this story were in a similar position, there's a lot they could have told their son about the reality of race in this country, but there are reasons why they might not have, other than naivete.
That they were naive about the police is less surprising. My parents bred a zero-at-the-bone fear of cops in me. If they hadn't, and if I hadn't come to know cops personally/professionally, I think I'd be just as naive.
But it's not bad parenting we need to be concerned with, it's racism.
Joanna