When the boy who would become my foster son was 14 years old, he grabbed a big knife out of a kitchen drawer and threatened his parents with it.

They called 911, but because this was Canada and not the United States, his social worker showed up before the cops. When police arrived, they didn’t draw their weapons. They did not kill the boy. They did not even arrest him.

Instead, his social worker drove him to the apartment where my partner and I lived, and he became part of our family.

He had blonde hair and blue eyes, so I expect even in the United States, he would not have died that night.

But if he’d been Black, I shudder to think what would have happened.