Roy Wilkins Park and the Failure of Public Care: The Geography of Black Precarity

I still live in the beautiful neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens. I am an educator in St. Albans and have been here for 10 years. I am a micro small Black woman business owner, Blyssom by Shapel, and I commute from home as a PhD scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University. But before all of that, I was a Black girl in the 90s and early 2000s attending PS 123Q and MS 226Q, and even more importantly, I STILL live in my ancestors' coveted home, and I live within various proximities to chaos and calamity. 

Earlier this year, I just missed bullets flying at one of my local Dunkins near my job. And on this past Thursday, I was able to avoid witnessing the recent tragedy that unfolded in my beloved community due to my fatigue and intuition that something was a little off at Roy Wilkins Park. This was not just a shooting. It was a collapse of the promise of public space. A trigger to a memory I had of being able to get out of Ajax over 25 years ago, when bullets went flying at a local Basketball tournament. Babies were in diapers, running around. But now I am a mom, and something eerily forced out, “Sage Ali, we are not going to the park today, there are a lot of people in there and a lot of big kids.”  A basketball court in a park is supposed to be one of the last ordinary sanctuaries of youth life: play, heat, noise, competition, friendship, and becoming for youth as they discover their identities.

So when another 15-year-old is killed there, the violence is not only against a person. It is a trauma and memory, and a paranoia for my own child and all children. I am an educator, and I truly have an embedded care ethic for all the children in the community. And at the same time, especially Black youth, specifically Black youth who are exploring and experimenting with identities. Some may label them good boys and good girls, and some may label them troubled; they are all Black children with potential. This violence and negligence are against the very idea that Black children deserve places to gather without death stalking them

This is the actual photo of Jaden Pierre. I am so tired of the wrong images being circulated.

This happened in my world. Jaden Pierre was Ms. Weston’s sweet son who attended Eagle Academy and did what kids do at parks, gather and play. Until disagreement broke out, until an evil and total stupor gripped a crowd of youth, and many adults like me passed on by to get to their lives. This brings me to the disposability of the youth and the lack of caring and authentic third spaces. This violence is about a public pedagogy. Somewhere along the way, generations upon generations decided Black youth were disposable. Millennials are included in that number. This is partially a failure of community and budgeting, and a lack of consideration for the youth voice. What does it mean when the park, the corner store, the basketball court, the schoolyard, and even the walk home are no longer merely ordinary sites of Black social life, but become contested terrain where chaos can erupt without warning? What does it mean when a child gathering in public can be read as a threat, a target, a spectacle, or simply collateral before they are ever recognized as sacred? These are not abstract questions for me. They are geographic, ancestral, and maternal. They are pedagogical. They live in my route, in my body, and now in my memory, dream, and nightmare.

I am still a Southside Jamaica Queens girl. I have not left home. To live in South Jamaica is to live inside a layered archive. It is to know beauty and danger at once. It is to know block pride, kinship, style, survival, laughter, cookouts, familiar faces, church clothes, summer bikes, and children playing double dutch in the same psychic landscape as sirens, caution, grief, and the sudden need to move quickly. I still live in my ancestors’ coveted home, coveted implies value, struggle, possession, and attempted theft. Our neighborhoods have always been more than pathology. They are desired spaces, shaped by Black striving, migration, memory, and care. But they are also spaces that the state has too often neglected, overpoliced, underprotected, and symbolically abandoned. So when violence enters public space, it does not arrive in a vacuum. It enters through cracks that have long been left open.

 What I am also living with are the late-night street takeovers on my block, where cars spin in circles, do donuts, and pour a coordinated violence of noise into the night. This has happened on my block twice in three weeks. And each time, I feel the ordinary architecture of home get shaken loose. The block stops feeling like an extension of care and starts feeling like contested terrain. This is a disturbance, and I read it as another expression of public breakdown, another way that spectacle overtakes sanctuary in neighborhoods already asked to carry too much. It is a pedagogy of instability, a lesson in how fragile rest has become, how easily communal space can be occupied by risk, performance, and force. For those of us raising children, tending households, building lives, and trying to protect some small softness in the midst of historical strain, these moments communicate something devastating: that even the night is no longer organized around our right to dwell in peace.

What unfolded at Roy Wilkins Park is not just about one disagreement gone wrong. It is about the erosion of public sanctuaries for Black youth. A park should be a third space, a place between home and school where young people get to experiment with selfhood, community, play, style, intimacy, competition, and social becoming. It should be where boys can laugh loudly, where girls can gather freely, where adolescents can try on who they are becoming without death hovering near their bodies. When that space collapses into mourning, something far deeper than safety has been breached. The imagination of childhood itself is disturbed. When two 15-year-old boys are killed on consecutive days in adjacent geographies, we are looking at more than violence; we are looking at the normalization of Black precarity, the collapse of public care, and the ongoing refusal to build a world where Black boys are treated as sacred, specific, and worth protecting before the candles, hashtags, and news cameras arrive.

15-year-old Quacere "Chase" Hagans was killed in a gang-related shooting in New York less than 48 hours prior.

And for Black children, that breach is especially devastating because they are so often denied the full social protection of childhood to begin with. Their mistakes are read as menace. Their experimentation is read as deviance. Their gatherings are read as disorder. Their grief is read as background noise. So the loss of a fifteen-year-old in a public park is not simply the loss of one life, though that alone is unbearable. It is another reminder that Black youth are too often forced to come of age within what I can only call a curriculum of instability, where vulnerability is ordinary, and the lesson is always that joy must remain alert.

As an educator, I cannot help but read this through pedagogy. Children are always learning, even when no formal lesson is being taught. They are learning from the conditions around them. They are learning from what is protected and what is not. They are learning from which adults intervene and which adults keep moving. They are learning from social media, from humiliation, from performance, from fear, from scarcity, from peer surveillance, from the economy of clout, from how quickly a crowd can become a chorus without conscience. This is why I do not see this as simply an individual moral failure. I see it as public pedagogy in its most devastating form. A whole social world is teaching our youth what to value, what to film, what to ignore, and what to survive.

And yet, I do not want to flatten these young people into symbols of decline. You will never see/hear me voice into this material world. I hate this generation.

That would repeat the same violence in another language. I am not interested in narratives that divide children into the innocent and the irredeemable, the promising and the doomed. I know too much. I have taught too many. I have loved too many. I was a Black girl youth myself and have been named/ and misnamed. Black youth are always more than the worst thing that happened near them, around them, or through them. They are experimenting with identity in a world that gives them too few safe rehearsals for conflict, emotion, rejection, masculinity, femininity, tenderness, and belonging. That does not excuse harm. But it does demand that we ask harder questions about what kinds of social, emotional, communal, and spiritual infrastructure we have failed to build around them.

Are we safe in Long Island Parks?

What haunts me, too, is the role of intuition. Because fatigue and discernment kept my daughter and me from entering that space, I am left with the unsettling knowledge of proximity. That is its own kind of trauma. To narrowly evade witnessing violence is to be initiated into a different kind of knowing. It teaches you that calamity is not distant. It is adjacent. It makes the ordinary feel fragile. And when you are a mother, that fragility becomes almost unbearable. You start to understand that part of Black motherhood is not simply nurturing life, but constantly reading atmospheres, scanning crowds, rerouting joy, and interpreting danger before it becomes visible. That is a labor too many of us know intimately and too few people name.

Are we safe in Parks on Sutphin Blvd?

This is why I return to memory. Ajax. The tournament. Bullets flying over children in diapers. The old lesson returns in a new scene. These are not disconnected incidents. They form a memory map of Black life under duress, where play can become panic in seconds. The child I was and the mother I am met each other on Thursday. The Black girl who once escaped and the Black woman who now redirected her own daughter were standing in the same spiritual corridor. That is what this tragedy reawakened in me: not only fear, but the long continuity of trying to protect Black life in places that should not require such vigilance.

So yes, this is about violence. But it is also about abandonment. It is about what happens when communities are expected to absorb unspeakable loss while being given too few real resources for healing, gathering, mentorship, recreation, conflict transformation, and care. It is about the disappearance of authentic third spaces and the criminalization or neglect of the few that remain. It is about the burden placed on teachers, mothers, aunties, coaches, pastors, and small business owners to keep stitching together a social fabric that larger systems have helped fray. It is about how we are asked to carry children through chaos while pretending the chaos is accidental.

Sage Ali at Roy Wilkins Park

I am left thinking that the question is not simply how to punish what happened. The deeper question is how to build a world where Black youth are no longer so proximal to death that intuition must do the work of policy, community design, and collective protection. How do we create spaces where our children can gather without performance overtaking presence, without conflict becoming spectacle, without grief becoming routine? How do we restore the sacredness of public space for Black life? Because Roy Wilkins Park should have remained what it was meant to be: a place of becoming. And if our children cannot safely become in public, then we must tell the truth that what is collapsing is not only public space, but the social commitment to Black childhood itself.

Black survival requires more than outrage. It requires discipline, memory, and material accountability. We cannot keep spending ourselves into dependency while speaking the language of liberation. No more Starbucks, no more Raising Cane’s, no more ritualized disinvestment in our own communities. What looks like casual consumption is often political surrender. We need practices of care that circulate life back into Black hands.