Why Do Black Children Keep Getting Killed Over Cheap Products?

A 1-year-old Black baby is dead in Mississippi. 

His name was Kohen Wiley. Before he was shot, his mother lifted him up so police officers could see there was a child in the car. This mother’s desperate act was supposed to be proof of innocence, vulnerability, and a new life they were obligated not to destroy.

It didn’t matter. 

They still fired.

Young Kohen was shot in his ribcage while his mother was holding him.

He was killed on Sunday after police in Senatobia responded to a reported shoplifting call at a Walmart. According to authorities, officers tried to stop a vehicle connected to the call. They claimed the driver moved toward them, and then one officer fired into the car. Kohen was later pronounced dead at a hospital, and another adult driving the car was critically wounded. 

All this over a pack of diapers that cost roughly between $13 to $30. In America, apparently, this is the cheap price placed on a Black baby’s life. And already the usual chorus of racists who hate Black children because they are proof that slavery and Jim Crow didn’t win has gathered to explain why this baby’s life should be weighed against a pack of diapers.

Even that remains contested. 

Across social media, users have disputed the police version, with some circulating claims that Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, had a receipt. The family and supporters are demanding that Walmart release surveillance footage and body camera footage, too. 

They are right to demand it. Because in America, police narratives about Black people are too often treated as fact before the public ever sees the evidence. Not to mention, the long history of official misconduct, from false testimony to suppressed evidence to coercive tactics, has helped destroy Black lives for generations.

There is also a video circulating of Kohen’s mother giving her side of the story. She says she was not shoplifting, that she showed officers her baby, and she was not charged with any crime. So, before anybody starts erecting a gallows out of Walmart receipts and police statements, maybe we should ask why a baby is dead before the public has seen the evidence.

But of course, racists do what racists do. They have turned this dead child into a sermon on Black criminality. They are acting as if Black people invented theft, as if white folks don’t walk out of stores across this country every day with unpaid merchandise tucked under a stroller, shoved in a purse, slipped into a coat pocket, or hidden beneath the lies they tell about themselves.

In fact, research has already punctured that fantasy. A University of Florida study using covert observation found that Black and Hispanic shoppers were no more likely than white shoppers to steal merchandise. Another national study by NIH found that 11.3% of U.S. adults reported having shoplifted at some point in their lives. 

Researchers in another study published by the Justice Quarterly, titled Who Actually Steals?, watched 1,243 shoppers by CCTV in a suburban drugstore. They observed 105 thefts and found that shoplifting cut across racial lines. But then, after correcting for sampling bias, they found the store’s actual shopper population was 63.7% white, 22.8% Black, and 8.3% Hispanic. In other words, the aisles where people are stealing are mighty white, too. Shoplifting is not a Black pathology. It is a human behavior, and oftentimes it is a poverty behavior.

But I want y’all to hear me clearly when I say: I do not care if this mother really had stolen diapers. If you see a woman stealing diapers, you either didn’t see it and mind your business, or you buy the damn diapers for her.

I know that sentence will make some people clutch their pearls. Let them clutch. A pack of diapers is not worth a baby’s life. A bottle of water is not worth a child’s life. Orange juice is not worth a child’s life. No cheap product sitting on a shelf under fluorescent lights should be converted into a death sentence for a Black child.

Because let’s keep it all the way real. Nobody steals diapers just for the hell of it. What woman do you know would risk arrest, public shame, and the possibility of losing her child to the foster care system just so she can live dangerously in the baby-care aisle? Diapers are a basic necessity, not a luxury good.

But diapers are not cheap. They’ve gotten more expensive, and they remain a serious monthly burden for families. Data from the Urban Institute show that a family can spend upwards of $100 per child per month on diapers. And unlike food, diapers generally cannot be purchased with SNAP or WIC benefits. So when people get online talking about diaper theft like it’s some moral failure, they are ignoring a basic fact that there’s an actual phenomenon called “diaper insecurity” because this country has made even keeping a baby clean and dry too expensive for many parents.

And yet, over and over again, Black children become collateral damage in America’s holy war over property.

Look at Cyrus Carmack-Belton. He was 14 years old when former South Carolina store owner Rick Chow chased him after wrongly suspecting him of stealing water. Prosecutors said Cyrus had put the bottles back. Chow chased him more than 130 yards and shot him in the back. A jury acquitted Chow of murder. 

Water. Diapers. Juice. Candy. These are not luxuries. They are the small, ordinary items of human survival and childhood. And yet, in the hands of racist capitalism, they become evidence, provocation, justification. They become the props in America’s favorite courtroom drama: property versus Black life.

We need to talk about why so many people cannot afford basic things in the first place. Diapers are expensive. Formula is expensive. Food is expensive. Rent is criminal. Wages are stagnant. Utilities are eating people alive. Corporations raise prices, underpay workers, shrink products, bust unions, close stores, criminalize poverty, and then call the police when poor people try to survive inside the economy those corporations helped create.

The same system that makes life unaffordable then deputizes police, store owners, security guards, and armed vigilantes to punish the people crushed by that unaffordability. And Black people get the bullet, regardless of age.

Kohen Wiley is not an isolated horror. Three-month-old La’Mello Parker was killed in Mississippi in 2021 during a police pursuit and shootout involving his father. One-year-old Legend Smalls was shot in the head by Houston police in 2021 when officers fired at a robbery suspect who had jumped into his mother’s car. He survived, but only after catastrophic injuries. Ta’Kiya Young, a pregnant Black mother accused of shoplifting, was shot through her windshield by an Ohio officer in 2023. She and her unborn daughter died. Charleena Lyles, pregnant and a mother, called Seattle police for help and was killed in her own home. 

The pattern is not that every case is identical. The pattern is that Black mothers, Black babies, Black children, and unborn Black children keep being treated as acceptable losses when police decide property, suspicion, fear, and control matter more than Black life.

And no, after doing an archival news search, I was not able to find a documented case in America where police shot and killed a white infant over an alleged pack of diapers. That absence says something. White people steal. White people disobey and drive away from the police. White folks panic and make bad decisions. White people have babies in cars, too. But whiteness is rarely made to stand trial through the body of a dead infant.

Blackness is.

In America, killing Black babies is not new. There’s a long heritage of Black infants and toddlers being shot out of their mothers’ arms, gunned down by Klansmen and night riders during home invasions, used as target practice during race riots, killed while sitting in their fathers’ laps, shot during police raids while sleeping in their homes, and even dying before birth when their mothers were lynched or beaten by police. 

Kohen Wiley belongs to that history. Not because history repeats itself in identical form, but because America keeps finding new uniforms, new excuses, and new legal language for the same old arrangement: Black children can be made killable whenever white fear, property or authority claims to feel threatened.

So let’s stop pretending this is just about diapers. This is about a country where corporations can steal wages, jack up prices, poison communities, and receive tax breaks, while a Black mother accused of taking something her baby needs can end up with police bullets flying into her car.

Kohen Wiley should be alive.

And if America can look at a dead 1-year-old and still ask whether the diapers were paid for, then the moral rot is not in that Walmart parking lot alone. It is everywhere.

SEE ALSO:

Kohen Kartier Wiley: Mother Says No One Drove Toward Cop Who Killed Her Son

Mississippi Cop Fatally Shoots 1-Year-Old Black Boy During Reported Shoplifting Incident

Juice, Water, Diapers: Why Do Black Children Keep Getting Killed Over Cheap Products? was originally published on newsone.com