Recently I read Between the World and me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The idea to communicate to my son via letter about similar societal issues resonated with me. Here is a VERY ROUGHT DRAFT. Let me know what you think.
Dear Little Man,
Lately you’ve been wondering why all your friends can play guns, but you are not allowed to. Buddy, there is so much I want to tell you but don’t know how. It will break my heart when you lose this innocence you are privileged to have, that many children who look like you are not as blessed to know. So I give you this as an answer, a letter you won’t be allowed to read for a few years.
I’ve been acutely aware that some day we will need to have ‘the talk,’ that I was never given, since you were in utero. Hell, the television programming we watched in the maternity ward the night you were born was interviews in the aftermath of George Zimmerman getting off for murdering Trayvon Martin. A boy that could one day be you, rocking a hoodie and armed with a sweet tooth.
There are some things I’m not sure how to teach you. I am not sure how to teach you life lessons that I never lived and only learned at an intellectual level. I don’t know what it truly is to be a black boy growing into manhood in America. Right now you are 4 years old, and we have always taught you that every person is equal. In the coming years you will learn this is only a belief, and not a reality.
The reality is this entire country was built on the unpaid labor of black people; bought, sold and treated as property. Held in bondage for hundreds of years. They built not only the country but the entire early economy. After emancipation, there was slavery by another name, lynchings, Jim Crow, eventually decades of separate but sure as shit not equal, redlining and de jour housing policies, the assassinations of great leaders, new Jim Crow, mass incarceration, crack epidemic, ignored ghettos, Rodney King, the LA riots, Trayvon,” hands up don’t shoot”, “cant breathe” and this is just scratching the surface.
You and I will be able to go through American history together, and I’ll teach you all about everything from the Middle Passage to the modern day plantation that is our prison system. What I don’t know how to teach is this talk. That little black kids cant play as safely with toy guns as little white kids. The same people that talk about how cute your hair is now will be staring at you in stores for entirely different reasons when you are older. The reason your mom sighs when you want to be a police officer is that many of those you look up to are here to protect a world view that doesn’t care as much about her and you. The era of the smart phone has brought this to forefront. I can point to this but I don’t know how to teach you to carry yourself around them. I’m scared I don’t know how to protect you like a black father would. Your mother had never been a minority until she moved to America. She only learned the extent of America’s systematic oppression when she moved here. She doesn’t know how to give you this talk either.
I can only hope that in subsequent drafts, I find the words I lack in this first rambling.