Beyond Ferguson there are countless race-related conversations. We are also talking about the police. When the two come together…Well, what do you think? A White Sheriff, His Black Son…What might the two say when they sit down to dinner? Race. Justice. Might a kitchen table conversation help us to better understand the links? Consider this family’s story. And again, please tell us what do you think.

White Sheriff Talks Race, Police With His Black Son

Guests: Kevin Fisher-Paulson | Produced By: Arwa Gunja and Jillian Weinberger | Originally Published at The Take Away. August 20, 2014
Photograph; Kevin Fisher-Paulson with his husband Brian and his sons Zane (right) and Aiden. (Stephanie Boone)
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Last October, a police officer in Santa Rosa, California, shot and killed a 13-year-old boy named Andy Lopez. The Latino teenager was carrying a toy gun, which the officer said he believed was real. An hour away, at a home in San Francisco, Zane Fisher-Paulson was in shock.
“My son Zane sat at the kitchen table as we were listening on the radio about it and he started crying,” recalls Kevin Fisher-Paulson, Zane’s father. “And I said, ‘Zane, why are you crying?’ And he said, ‘Could that happen to me?’”
Fisher-Paulson is a deputy sheriff in San Francisco. He and his husband, Brian, are both white. Zane, 11, the older of their two adopted sons, is black.
For Fisher-Paulson’s multiethnic family — including 9-year-old Aiden, who’s mixed-race — Lopez’s death sparked a conversation about police and race that he’d never had to consider while growing up in a “pretty insular white, Irish-Catholic family.” Now the dinner table where he heard the news has become a frequent forum for race issues.
“Raising a black child has certainly awoken my awareness to race in America,” Fisher-Paulson says.
He’s had that awareness since he and Brian first adopted their children. The pair watched as strangers empathyeducates – A White Sheriff, His Black Son; Kitchen Table Conversations About Race: