“Well, that should've been your answer to take yo' ass home,” she said.Had she been with me that day, she might very well have reacted like Toya Graham. You might know Graham as the Internet celebrity “hero mom” or through the hashtag #MomOfTheYear or from the front page of the New York Post.
A Baltimore mother hailed as 'Mom of the year' for clobbering her teenage son and dragging him home from the riots admitted sheepishly on Wednesday: 'My pastor is going to kill me.'
Toya Graham, a single mother-of-six, was caught on camera whacking her 16-year-old son Michael, pulling off his ski mask and chasing him down the street as rioters clashed with police, looted stores and burned down buildings and cars.
The riots broke out following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray earlier this month who died of a spinal cord injury after being taken into custody by Baltimore police.
Her actions have drawn praise from moms across the country along with the Baltimore police chief who said: 'I wish there were more parents out there who took charge of their kids tonight.'
Miss Graham told CBS on Wednesday that she 'just lost it' when she saw Michael at Monday's riots carrying a rock and walking towards police officers.
She said: 'I recognized those baggy sweatpants and we made eye contact. I was saying ''how dare you do this?'''
On a very basic level, the worship of Graham is built on a misunderstanding of her motivation. Many in the media have presumed she was furious at her son for taking part in a riot, and dished out the blows that police and pundits think young black men need to get them back in line. But that's not what she says drove her.
Young black men, like Graham’s son, are 21 times more likely than young white men to be shot dead by police. Graham was scared for her child.
“That’s my only son and I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray," Graham told CBS. "Two wrongs don't make a right, and at the end of the day I just wanted to make sure I had gotten my son home."My own grandmother isn’t much different from Graham. She wasn't concerned that I was on the streets rioting. She knew that I was there as a journalist covering the situation, and she supports the calls for justice in the face of police brutality. Nana prefers peaceful protests over rioting, like Graham -- and they both understand the anger and frustration of a community that turns to rioting because they feel like there’s no other way their voices will be heard. And they both fear for the lives of the black children they love. That's why she didn't want me to be a part of it -- she didn't want me to become another hashtag.
Knowing that Graham's primary motivation was to keep her son safe from police violence, would so many white observers have been as sympathetic to the beating she laid out? “Let’s be honest: many white folks are reflexive critics of the greater frequency of corporal punishment in the black community. Witness the media horror at Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson beating his young son,” wrote Joan Walsh in Salon. “If Graham beat her child like that in the aisles of CVS, you can be sure somebody would call CPS."
Indeed, American media have long condemned black parents for hitting their children. And the fact that police can be a mortal threat to black men and boys is no mystery to anybody paying attention to the news, so Graham's fear should have been widely seen for what it was. Yet beating this child, on this day, struck a different chord in the white community. Why?
Danielle Williams, a local resident involved in the protests, caught her own wave of Internet fame by torching an MSNBC anchor for the media's failure to focus on Baltimore before the violence. Reached by HuffPost, Williams said she thinks the mainstream media and white America are living vicariously through Graham “because she’s doing something that they wish that they could do to us and to our children.”
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