Nationally, black teenage boys are five times as likely as white teen boys to be killed

Sandy Banks:

In Los Angeles County, homicide accounts for two of every three deaths among young black men, compared with one in seven for whites, two in five for Latinos, and one in four for Asian Americans.

In high-crime neighborhoods, children grow up aware of the ambient presence of danger. They wear neutral colors to avoid being mistaken for gang members. They learn to duck at the sound of gunfire. Their worried parents order them straight home from school, make them stay off the streets and play inside.

For middle- and upper-class black parents, the tightrope walk is different. Their neighborhoods may be safer, their schools integrated, their children sheltered. But steering their boys through adolescence means keeping them tethered to uncomfortable realities of race.

Certainly, worries about the safety of adolescents are not the province of just black families or parents of boys. Car accidents kill more teens than anything else. More girls than boys today are trying drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. No parent is immune from the panic of a cellphone not answered, a curfew missed, a bout of teenage rebelliousness.

But raising black boys "requires a lot of additional sorting and interpreting, because you know they're dealing with an environment that is fearful of them at best and hostile at worst," says California Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a longtime black civic leader and the father of twin sons, now in college.

Regardless of a family's class or education, many parents find the challenge of bringing young black males to adulthood safely "daunting," Ridley-Thomas said. "When you look at the incarceration rates, dropout rates, crime rates — particularly homicide, whether perpetrators or victims — it is beyond unsettling."

Indeed, a scroll through the statistics makes it clear why some black parents in Los Angeles feel their sons have targets on their backs.

In school, black boys are three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended and twice as likely to drop out.

On the streets, blacks are twice as likely as Latinos, and four times as likely as whites to be victims of violent crimes. National studies show that black teens commit 50 percent more violent crimes than whites.

They are also four times as likely to be arrested and seven times as likely to be locked up.

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