Black mom told to take 3-year-old’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ chalk art to ‘other neighborhood’

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A Black California mother attempting to teach her 3-year-old daughter about the Black Lives Matter movement watched for days as the word “Black” in their “Black Lives Matter” sidewalk art was erased. Then, Manette Sharick decided to act. She wrote the words in an area that was visible from her home surveillance camera, and footage from the camera revealed the culprit, she told ABC affiliate KGO. 

It was a man who identified himself only as Jim, a resident in the city of Concord, which is about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco. Jim told KGO he would continue defacing the art. “I was only pouring across the word Black because I believe that all lives matter,” he said. “I don’t care what nationality, sexual orientation or any of that, we are all human beings.”

What Jim is apparently oblivious of is the fact that we are not all treated as human beings, with harsher and sometimes deadly punishments handed out to those with darker skin pigments. George Floyd, a Black man, was targeted in a brutal Minneapolis arrest that ended with his death in police custody May 25. And even closer to Jim’s home city, Willie McCoy, a 21-year-old Black rapper, was shot 38 times when officers fired 55 bullets into his car while he was sleeping outside a Vallejo Taco Bell Feb. 9, 2019, according to newly released body camera video and autopsy findings.

WARNING: This video contains violent content that may not be suitable for younger readers.

This happened less than 20 miles from Concord, but Jim’s unfortunate advice to the mother attempting to teach her daughter that Black lives should, in fact, matter was still to take the lesson elsewhere. “If you want to do it in other neighborhood then fine,” he could be heard saying when Sharick confronted him.

“This is my house,” she told him. She later told KGO: “Writing with chalk on a sidewalk is causing no harm or damage to the community. If you disagree that’s fine but don’t damage what was written on a sidewalk on somebody else’s home. All you have to do is keep walking.”

When Sharick’s video of the encounter went viral, other neighbors also began writing BLM, which stands for Black Lives Matter, on the sidewalk, KGO reported. Jim told the news station he is “not a racist.” He said he poured water on the artwork because he thought someone was tagging his house with racist thoughts. When asked, Jim didn’t say whether he thought the phrase Black Lives Matter expresses a racist sentiment, but he told KGO: “I think in the beginning when it started it had good intentions, but I think it’s been hijacked.”

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