#WhileBlack, The Talk, and Sheltered Black Boys

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Two police officers stood in front of the school. They seemed to be doing something close to nothing, chatting with a parent. The parent seemed to know them, but the conversation also appeared…strained. I know this parent; her body language suggested discomfort, annoyance, and a little anger.

I was walking with my 12-year-old son and his friend, both black boys, as I passed by the officers and the mom. One of the officers briefly looked at me, but beyond that none of the three acknowledged me. The situation didn’t seem to warrant my intervention, although I was a bit concerned about why police officers were outside of this majority black private school. But I needed to go about my day, so I ignored them and continued to think about what I was going to buy at the supermarket to feed the six hungry children that I was taking home and caring for.

I was lost in my thoughts (“pizza? or maybe hotdogs and chicken? They’ll want chips and popsicles too . . .”) when I hear my son’s friend say, “… well if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t need to worry.” Then my son says, “Yeah . . . and you should look like you aren’t doing anything wrong.”

Their words immediately put my supermarket daydreams to an end. Wait…what? How did we get here? How did we get to the point where these two black boys living in Chicago — the same Chicago that killed Laquan MacDonald, the same Chicago where racial segregation is palpable — are parroting such myths as “the only people who should be worried about the police are criminals?”

How can they see the world this way in the same Chicago where the Obama-era Justice Department found that the Chicago Police Department “engage in a pattern or practice of using force, including deadly force, that is unreasonable” and unconstitutional; “does not investigate the majority of cases it is required by law to investigate;” “does not provide officers or supervisors with adequate training and does not encourage or facilitate adequate supervision of officers in the field”?

Tamir Rice
Tamir Rice, 12-years-old

How are they so unaware and detached from the fact that their very existence is threatening to so many, as most poignantly shown in the police murder of Tamir Rice, a little black 12-year-old just like them.

2017-02-21 11.09.37
My son, 12-years-old

What did I do wrong, a scholar and a lawyer that writes and teaches about race and racism and children every single day, what did I do wrong that I haven’t prepared my child for the reality, given the odds, he is soon to confront? Haven’t we had “The Talk“?

As common in Black families as the conversations about the “birds and the bees,” The Talk explains to black children the reality of being black. The Talk tells black children that people will treat them differently for the simple fact of the hue of their skin, the shape of their nose, and the texture of their hair. The Talk tells little black boys that even when they are innocent, they are guilty. Even when they are children, they are being perceived as adults. Even when they are “just playing,” they are being watched, judged, profiled. That even if they are doing nothing wrong, even if they look like they are doing nothing wrong, it may not matter.

Just a week ago in my seminar, I showed my students a video of police officers rolling up on a group of boys and pulling their gun. The boys were walking home from playing basketball. As the police car rolled up to them, the cops jumped out and immediately told the boys to get on the ground. One boys seems to be shocked, and doesn’t immediately get down. GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS! A boy starts to cry, wailing as his face presses against the concrete. The boys shout – What did we do?? What did we do? The crying boy’s brothers tells him to stop crying, it’s going to be okay. I don’t want to die. Unbelievably, the police officer, gun still drawn, softens his voice, telling the boys it’s going to be okay.

The video fast forwards to the children’s parents confronting the police. As the police attempt to justify their actions, saying they didn’t know if the boys with basketballs in their arms had guns, one mother yells and cries at her child. “THIS IS WHY I DON’T LET Y’ALL GO NOWHERE!” As the boy protests, says that he did nothing wrong, his mother: “IT DON’T MATTER! IT DON’T MATTER!”

I weep every time I watch that video, as I imagine my son on that ground, face pressed into the sidewalk, crying. But then I realize why even if we’ve had The Talk, he’s never quite heard The Talk, why it doesn’t feel real to him: I don’t allow him out of my sight.

These two boys are sheltered, for the exact reasons articulated by this mother: because it doesn’t matter that they are 12-years-old, that they still like Pokemon, that hide-and-seek and tag and infection and four square are still a part of their play repertoire. They go nowhere without us, their parents. Not to school, not walking around the block, not wandering in a store, not to the park. Because I don’t want them to be the victim of a hashtag: #GoingToSchoolWhileBlack. #WalkingAroundTheBlockWhileBlack. #GroceryShoppingWhileBlack. I don’t want anyone to be SayingTheirName.

But now I can’t have him not understanding the reality of his world. That so many little boys just like him are pulled to the side by the police for no reason other than living and being a kid #WhileBlack. That he needs to be overly compliant with police officers even when he’s done nothing wrong. That he needs to press his face into the concrete if they tell him to do so. That crying won’t help, that only doing exactly what they say might save his life.

I hesitated before saying those words. Because just for another 30 seconds, one minute, five minutes, I wanted him to remain that little boy, believing in the ultimate justness of the world, that men and women in blue are always only wanting to help him and not hurt him. I wanted him to remain my baby, the beautiful black boy that I loved before he was even born, now 12-years-old but still a boy. Not a man. A boy.

But I did it because it needed to be done. And afterwards, I cried.

How Google Hangouts Helps My Marriage

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When you have three kids, two full-time jobs, a household, and a marriage, sometimes one of those has to fall by the wayside. We have only 24 hours in the day, and kids have immediate needs, jobs have deadlines, bills need to be paid, groceries need to be bought, dinners need to be made.

But marriages seem to lack everyday demands. If my bills aren’t paid, I could lose my house. My job isn’t done well, I could lose my job. No food means starvation. Child neglect is not an option.

But my marriage is crucial to my well-being. I want to live in a harmonious home, where love is palpable, affection is given freely, and we talk to each other and not yell at each other. That requires communication.

Sometimes, my husband and I have NO time to talk at home. Our children are high-maintenance, in the best of ways — they love to talk and play games. But then they are high-maintenance in the worst of ways — they get sick, they need homework help, they fight each other. And, oh yeah — they require food and clothes. Every day. Bills don’t pay themselves. My job requires an incredible amount of brain power.

So what do we do to make sure WE are okay? To make sure WE are meeting each other’s needs instead of always only meeting other people’s needs, including our children? We use technology to our benefit.

My husband and I talk every day on Google chat. Every day. Multiple times a day. We talk about our kids, we talk about our bills, we talk about our jobs.

But mostly, we talk about each other.

We express gratitude when we didn’t get a chance to do it properly. If the morning was really rushed and tempers flared, our 2pm G-chat is an opportunity, with calmed down emotions, to discuss what went wrong and how we can change it tomorrow. The medium allows for some dispassion and requires us to actually listen before we speak. We can strategize about a child without letting them know we are talking about them. We can say sorry and give each other the grace we deserve, knowing that we are both doing our best.*

We can work on us and what we want and need and then save our face-to-face together time to put those things into action. We can give each other gentle reminders about who we want to be, as parents and friends and lovers. Today, we talked about how to get out the house better and faster without yelling or getting upset with each other or the kids. We talked about how we don’t want the morning to be so tense. I don’t want him to be passive aggressive and sarcastic with me or the kids. He wants me to light more of a fire under the kids. We talked about how to make that happen.

And we either of us feels a little talked out, we can bow out of the conversation gracefully by saying “I have to get back to work. Love you!” Unlike in face-to-face, no hurt feelings. Because jobs.

And tonight, when we are together, our bedtime can be used for more important things. Because sex lives. Because laughter and fun.

So if you are feeling like you are missing serious talking time with your partner, if you feel like the metaphorical ships in the night, try using technology. Get gmail accounts. Open gmail on your work computer. And talk to your homie lover friend.

Dr. Mama Esq.

* We can even get a little naughty. But I’m not going to talk about that part.

P.S. — It’s also a great way to leave your kids at home alone and have a way to talk and see them without them having their own phone or a house phone. 

If you say you could have never been that mom, you are lying. Or, even worse — you have no idea how often it ALMOST did happen to you.

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If you didn’t know, a little black boy fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo. For ten minutes, he was dragged by a gorilla named Harambe before he was fatally shot and the little boy was saved. Harambe is dead. Little boy is alive. Not ideal, but child alive. Animal dead. Sounds about right if I had to choose one over the other.

But the little boy’s mother has been killed and brought back to life a million times over if the internet could have its way.

As a mother of a 4 year-old child, I weep for the mother at the receiving end of all of this judgment. She may have turned her back for only a minute, but in a crowded zoo it would have taken her longer than that lost minute to find him. We all would like to think that we would have been more attentive.

I consider myself a good parent. But the truth is that I’ve had that heart stopping moment when I’ve looked away and couldn’t find my child. And maybe that moment has been at a zoo, near a gorilla enclosure that has a space a small child can climb under.

So I give that mother the benefit of the doubt. I trust that she loves her child and watched her child and looked away for a moment and then shit just happened.

But a lot of other folks don’t give that benefit of the doubt. They especially don’t give it to mothers. ESPECIALLY not to black mothers. As if there is some truth that only women have eyes in the back and sides of their heads such that they can truly see their children from all angles at all times.

As Panama Jackson from VSB put it:

“For those of you without kids, do you know what parenting really is all about? Especially up to, say, age six? Keeping your kids alive. That’s it really. Everything is about making sure they don’t get dead. Keeping them from chasing that ball into the street. Making sure they understand to walk on sidewalks. Looking both ways before crossing the street. Not touching the stove. Not walking out the door without a parent. Always holding hands with an adult. ALWAYS walking in front of me so that I can see you, etc.”

When I can’t SEE Ahmad, I’m asking, “Where is Ahmad?” Because that’s how fast he can disappear and be into some mess.

And once he was outside, in the dark, looking for his dad and I didn’t know he was out there. Could have gotten hit by a car or mauled by a dog. In the 30 seconds I didn’t know where he was.

Another time, I wasn’t paying attention, and I locked him and the car keys inside the car. And he was a baby, strapped into his car seat.

Another time we were at the playground and I checked my phone real quick and then he was gone and when we found each other one minute later we were both crying.

And I have three kids, hundreds of stories for each. So like a million stories where something catastrophic could have happened to my child.

Those acting like it couldn’t have happened to them are lying. Or, even more scary — they have no idea how often it ALMOST did happen to them.

It’s mind boggling that we can’t all just call this an unfortunate accident and focus on fixing what can be fixed — making zoos so that there aren’t any ways for four year olds to climb under, over or through enclosures (or better yet, stop caging wild animals) — rather than decrying something that cannot be fixed: four year olds doing what four year olds do, parents doing their best, and shit happening no matter what.

The Miseducation of Byron Thomas. Or, if this is what they are teaching black kids, I’m homeschooling.

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Doctor Mama Esquire

Another example of how this week has just been too much:

I am a black South Carolinian. Here’s why I support the Confederate flag. 

– By Byron Thomas, via WaPost

If this is what they are teaching black children in school — that their “ancestors” were Confederate cooks who “served” admirably (but like used as a tool for his own oppression?); that being black means you can’t possibly support racist institutions (but see racism without racists); that racists have “hijacked” the Confederate flag (but it was created to maintain a racist institution called SLAVERY); and there is an actual reasoned logical debate over whether the Civil War was fought because of slavery OR states’ rights (but it was the states’ rights to have slavery) — then I’m homeschooling starting tomorrow.

Because #ICant.

History Channel “history channel” by Reavel via flickr

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My Latest on Blogher: Young Black Children and Suicide

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Doctor Mama Esquire

The first time I thought about killing myself, I was eleven. I’d had some trauma in my life, unspeakable things that my tween self could not articulate. Pain that ran deep, seated into my soul. I could not get away from it.

Image Credit: Sam D via Flickr

At eleven, I didn’t make a plan; plans came later in my teens. But I thought about death constantly and cried myself to sleep every night. With the every day assaults on myself as a child, a black child, a black girl-child, a working-class black girl-child—each breath was a chore. I had “black girl pain.”

I was lucky; I’m still here. Other children were not—are not as lucky as I was. While suicide among young children is rare, in the last twenty years since I was eleven, over 657 children aged ten and younger have committed suicide. Many more have tried…

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#MomOfTheYear, White Supremacy, and Black Responsibility

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Poignant pictures are spilling out of Baltimore. Photos of what we may soon regard as the latest protest in our “Spring” movement show brave bodies in various states of resistance. Some with faces covered, others brazenly identifiable — but all filled with the justifiable rage of living in what feels like a police state where black lives definitely do not matter.
As a scholar of black parenting, one picture stood out from the rest, one that surprisingly united folks from across the ideological divide on “acceptable” forms of protest. First reported on CNN, which has recently come under fire for their selective and sensationalized reporting, the photo shows Toya Graham and her 16-year-old son who, with face covered and rock in hand, had been a part of the resistance events of Monday afternoon.  With the cameras rolling, Graham repeatedly smacked and hit the teen upside his head, obviously incensed by what she was seeing and his presence. (I choose not to link to it here.)

Graham had become #MomOfTheYear. For those who saw “thugs” and “looters,” here was a black mother determined that her son not be a criminal. For those who saw “people tearing up their own community,” here was a black mother who seemingly advocated for non-violent protest, in the style of the MLK of revisionist history.  On both sides, here was — finally — a black parent who cared. (Even Oprah said so!)

I understand why she did what she did. Fear is a powerful motivator. So is love. As a black mother of black boys, I understand that if my 16 year old child was in the streets throwing rocks at the police, justifiably or not, I would want nothing more than to snatch him up and take him home. I likely would not have beat him over the head, but I would have done everything else in my power to get him off the street and Take. Him. Home. That’s the love of a parent who wants to protect her child. I hope, in her children’s eyes, that she is their mom of the year.

But she’s not THE mom of the year.

She’s the poster child of the moment for how we see black responsibility for the conditions in which we find ourselves.

Continue reading “#MomOfTheYear, White Supremacy, and Black Responsibility” →

On Fire

Dr. Mama Esq.4 Comments

by Amanda Enayati

There is a pile here: two big boxes and three large envelopes. The boxes are stamped Penguin Random House and the envelopes are from Simon Schuster. The boxes contain my first book, due to be released in early March. The envelopes contain a book I contributed a chapter to, alongside a slew of well-known and bestselling authors.

They’ve been sitting in the corner for weeks now, unopened.

“Why won’t you open them?” My ten-year-old daughter has asked me more than once.

“I don’t know. I’m waiting for a sign,” I’ve said more than once.

Truth is, I’m terrified.

I spent so many years bum-rushing the gate that it never occurred to me to think through what would happen if it ever opened.

What if I made mistakes? What if it sucks? What if everyone hates my book? What if everyone hates me? What if what if what if what if …

I snatched my book, which is about stress and what it can teach us about how to live, from the jaws of time. I wrote it while taking care of two kids, dropping off, picking up, helping with homework, buying groceries, making dinner, washing dishes, cleaning toilets, vacuuming, working part-time at a consulting gig — and without hired help because, shit, that’s expensive and it’s either childcare or the kids’ music classes. I know most of you won’t bat an eyelash at any of this, because you’re doing exactly the same thing (and much more) yourselves.

So why don’t I feel like I’m enough? Why am I spending so much of what should be a glorious moment of triumph huddled in an imaginary corner, biting my nails, envisioning worst-case scenarios, fearing disaster? What if what if what if …

I suspect my stories. I do. I think we get these stories early on. They are handed to us by our parents, our families, our communities, our ancestors, our friends, our media. And we walk through our entire lives, sticking to these scripts. Often blindly. And if your stories are not good ones, if they don’t serve you, well …

At this point, I have a pretty good sense of my script. And in many ways I have managed to flip it. The past is just a story we tell ourselves. I have learned how to create better stories—great stories sometimes—stories that help me, that serve me. Being a child refugee from a revolution; living for years without a country or your immediate family; not fitting in; being called ugly over and over again because you’re too dark, too foreign; suffering from PTSD after 9/11; almost dying from cancer—in my new stories, all of these are strengths. They are superpowers. They make me special. They make me different. They make my book different than the scores written by the supremely privileged whose advice I just. can’t. relate. to.

But I also know that I have to remain conscious, in the moment, mindful, on guard, because the old stories, the toxic ones, are there, ready to kick me down and keep me there.

I think of how my kids move through the world sometimes. I marvel at them. How they own the moments; how they relish the joys and successes; how they examine the failures; how they don’t take any of it personally; how they keep a sense of humor about most things. I raised these two. I told them about the bad stories. Warned them not to believe the bullshit. To hand it back to where it came from and say: “No, thank you.” To write their own stories. I want so badly to be like my children.

The book, Seeking Serenity, comes out in two weeks. It’s time: the best of times, the worst of times. It’s now.

I am out there battling the dragons, quieting voices of defeat, countering them with new narratives. And I know I’m winning because these lands I find myself in are new. I have never ever seen them before.

Yesterday I had a companion. And as battle raged, she sang to me.

“She’s living in a world and it’s on fire,” she sang.

“She’s got both feet on the ground … She got her head in the clouds. And she’s not backing down.”

Yes, I replied, yes, Ms. Alicia Keys.

This girl is on fire, we sang together, she’s on fire. She is she is she is she is she is.

Today. Maybe today is the day I will open the boxes.

Amanda Enayati is a columnist, author and speaker whose essays about stress, happiness, creativity, technology and identity have appeared widely. Her book, Seeking Serenity, will be published in March 2015. You can find her on Facebook or Twitter.

On black children, black history, and the good life

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Watching Ava DuVernay talk about Selma. Seeing black bodies beaten by white police officers.

“That was the past. They should get over it.”

You might think that these words came from the mouth of a conservative white male who is tired of talking about slavery, tired of talking about Jim Crow, and more focused on modern-day theories of black cultural pathology to explain today’s disparities (someone like him). But you would be wrong.

Those words came out of the mouth of my nine-year-old son.

My black nine year old son.

At first, I was simply stunned. Is he seeing what I’m seeing? We’re watching black people — black people like us — being bitten by dogs, assaulted with fire hoses, beaten by cops.  But all he saw was “history,” something unconnected to him and his life.

In some ways, his response should please me. Paula Giddings once told me that one of the best ways middle class blacks can be a part of the struggle is to enjoy the lives we have. Because successful black people were killed for enjoying their lives.

My boy lives a good life. He goes to a good school. He’s never been called a nigger or a porch monkey. He’s never been stopped by the police. He’s only encountered officers there to protect him. He leads a good life.

And I’ve successfully protected him. Every school year, there is something and someone new waiting to knock him down. To deny his intelligence. To stereotype him as a troublemaker. And every year, I’ve fought for him. I fought for them to simply leave my boy alone. I continue to fight for him and all black boys in our district.

But maybe I did too good of a job. Because he has no idea that there were fights to be had.

Yes, we’ve talked about Trayvon Martin and Eric Gardner and Mike Brown. We’ve attended rallies against the death penalty, and the state-sanctioned murder of black men. He is surrounded by our black “family,” the close friends that are at every birthday and school play, no matter what. He attends what we call “black camp” when he visits his grandparents on the East Coast for two months every summer, like our folks spent summers down South. We constantly talk about black people, past and present. I point out that they are black. We talk about race in our house.

But somehow, he’s not connecting these “lessons” to him and his life.

Maybe because he lives surrounded by black excellence. He lives on a college campus. All our family friends are black professionals — lawyers, doctors, PhD students, PhD holders. His mama has a PhD. Black people being great is what he sees. He hasn’t learned first hand the barriers one must overcome to be where many of us are.

But our children are more likely to experience downward mobility than other folks. As much as we’d hoped it would, all we — the collective we – have worked for is often not enough to shield them from the realities of blackness. As Chris Rock said, most white people would never change places with him and become a black man. And he’s rich. Although my boy doesn’t get it now, life will make him understand what it means to be black.

Back to our conversation — I hope I quickly recovered from my original shock. I explained to him that he lives a good life quite unlike many black people. That the reason he is the only black boy in his grade at school is because not many black people live here because not many black people can afford to do so. That mama went to an all black school when I was a kid because policies made it such that black people lived in a different place than where white people lived. That black people go to prison more often than white folks, that black people go to colleges like Stanford less than white people, that black people make less money than white people. That even though we aren’t being beaten in the street on national TV, black men are being killed by police officers because they look scary — and that they are afraid of us simply because we are black. That even though we have a black president, the president has a limited role in making things better for people. That black people still aren’t thought to be as smart as white folks. That black people are not respected like other people.

That’s when he looked at me. “Well, I’m going to be an engineer when I grow up, and I’ll show them.” Pause. “I mean, all I want is to be respected. I just want to be respected.”

That response soothed my soul for a little while. But I want him to know he should be respected whether he is an engineer or an artist or an athlete or a teacher or lawyer or homeless. He shouldn’t — and he doesn’t — have to do anything to “gain” respect. He should be respected because he is a human being, just like everyone else. I want him to have a sense of the linked fate that I feel towards other black people, other disrespected people, other people considered “less than.”

That’s going to take many more conversations. But next time, I’m gonna be ready.

“Which One is Yours?”

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By Amanda Frye Leinhos

“So, which one is yours?”

I was sitting in the front row, amiably chatting with the woman next to me at the middle school’s Geography Bee finals.  My daughter Mimi, a 7th grader, was one of the 40 finalists, and she’d been a little nervous, so I’d found seats up front for my two other daughters and myself, so that we could catch her eye and make faces and try to help her relax. I had just collected our belongings and sacrificed the seat I’d been saving for my husband, who was late getting out of a meeting, so that the couple next to me could sit down.  The white women in this affluent Silicon Valley community generally seem to fall into two types, and the woman next to me was more like a techie mom than a trophy mom – one who did programming instead of Pilates, who’d married late, had a kid in her early forties, and was spoiling the heck out of him.  She’d been telling me all about her son, and how excited he was to be here, and how they’d always known he had a gift for learning and retaining these kinds of facts, and how incredibly smart and talented he was.  I could see the moment that she remembered — if I was sitting in the front row, it was most likely because I had a kid in the competition, too.

“So, which one is your daughter?”

“She’s just there, in the front row.  There are two girls sitting together? She’s the one on the right.”

She shifted and began to gush about what an achievement it was that our kids had made it to the finals and what an accomplishment it was in a school of this size to be among the finalists and how proud I should be, clearly thinking that as a black mother I must have no idea about how important education was to my child’s success and that I should be encouraged to value this experience.  She smiled at me, pleased with herself for doing her liberal duty on behalf of the less fortunate.  I closed my eyes briefly and took a breath, my usual coping strategy when I’m getting racially read as inferior, condescended to, and underestimated.  I was really glad she didn’t try to pat me on the hand.  Actually, she should be glad.

“So where is she? I don’t see her.”

I turned to look at the woman next to me.  What more could I say?  You can’t pick out the two girls in the front row? You don’t know your right from left?  I tried one more time, just to be nice.

“Front row. Fourth from the left. One. Two. Three. Four.  Ponytail. Glasses.”

“Huh.”

The woman looked away, turned toward her husband, and started telling him about how there were snacks on the table in the back of the room, if he wanted some.  Apparently, that was the end of our conversation.

I’m a brown-skinned woman, I’ve loc’d my hair, people clearly read me as African American.  But my husband is white, and we have three daughters who vary in hue from golden brown to pale.  Nadia, our oldest, is dark enough that people assume she’s related to me, but that doesn’t always happen with our younger two girls.  Mimi was evidently light enough by this woman’s measure that she couldn’t see my daughter as mine.  My presence at this event was already slightly illegitimate in her eyes; she’d already behaved as though she believed black families aren’t supposed to value education.  But in that moment we went from illegitimate to invisible, because we didn’t fit her idea of what a family should look like.  I’m not mad about it.  It happens often enough that I don’t often get angry anymore.  Instead I thought, “How sad for you.”

How sad, because no black woman has ever questioned whether my kids belonged to me.  And how sad, because our ability to define family broadly and with love is one of the ways black folks have survived in this country.  Being able to lean on each other, to care for each other’s children, and to rely on each other for support and advice builds the resilience of black women and black families.  My kids have so many ‘cousins’ because of all the friends we claim as family, and these relationships ground them and connect them to a collective identity that carries them through the inevitable challenges they face.  There are so many people in our lives who’d have claimed my baby as theirs, and been just as proud of her as I was.  And having just come off of a week of vacation and visits filled with the experience of kinship, I wasn’t all that mad about her ignorance.  I was just grateful for what we have.

As it turned out, her son and my daughter washed out on the same question, which three-quarters of the finalists weren’t able to answer correctly.  No shame there – they all did well.  Mimi had regained her cool after the first question was asked, and she genuinely enjoyed herself. At the end, we celebrated and clapped and cheered, and they all received an official certificate and pin for their participation.  And I left feeling some compassion for that woman, whose definition of family was so narrow that she couldn’t see my daughter was mine.

Amanda Frye Leinhos is a mother of three daughters and a doctoral candidate in sociology of education at Stanford, where she studies race, inequality, and language and the role they play in schools.  She holds a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees from Harvard and was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area. 

Photo courtesy of Vox Efx via Flickr

(Black) Boys 2 (Black) Men

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By Annie Holmes

About a year ago, my husband and I were talking about disciplining our children. We are raising three boys (11, 8 and 8 months). During the conversation, my husband stated, “You are raising boys. I am raising men.” As we unpacked this statement, I found that he was not diminishing my approach to parenting, but that he was drawing upon his experiences as a black man growing up in the Unites States.

We began to talk about the conversations he had with his father, that as a black daughter I was not privy to. We have had to talk with them about engaging with police. We talked about our desire to see them be strong and independent with sky high dreams and a strong education to back that up, while at the same time being vulnerable, caring, kind, social justice minded and honest. We talked about appearance, how they should carry themselves and setting priorities. We both want the same things, but our lenses are very different.

We are consciously raising black boys to be black men. We talk about it. We pray about it. And we prepare them for it. Because, we know that no matter how hard we try, how much wealth we have or what kind of car we drive, when people see our boys, they won’t see the values that have been instilled. Nor will they see their intelligence. But, Dr. King’s vision has not been realized. They will yet be judged by the color of their skin. So, while I try to do my part to change this great big world, we will continue to raise our black boys to be black men.

Annie Holmes is a wife, mother of three amazing brown boys and higher education administrator. Her work involves access, equity and inclusion in learning and workplace environments. Her true passions are family, social justice, and singing. She tends to find ways to do them all.