Open Letter to My Black Son

No one has to tell you the position you hold on my list of importance.  You were number one from the minute I heard your boisterous howl in that delivery room.  I have been your number one fan from that day forward.

You have certainly made it easy for me to be as doting as I am.  You were a mischievous little thing, always on the move, always exploring the world around you, especially those things I preferred you didn’t see.  But you excelled. In school, when you weren’t banished to the hallway for entertaining your classmates with your antics, you amazed your teachers with your ability to read and comprehend books at reading levels years above your age.  Your athleticism was apparent, even at age 5, when you played your first T-ball game.

You learned about racial prejudice much too soon, despite my efforts to minimize your exposure to it.  That blonde boy at Peter Piper Pre-School, where you spent your days while I worked at the University of Chicago, brought to your attention the fact that your skin was what he called black. You argued with him, pulling the black crayon out of your box of many colors and holding it against your arm.  You knew your arm was not black, even if you were only 4 years old.  We talked about it when I picked you up from school that day.  It was the day you lost your innocence, in a way.

Today you tell me how wise it was of me to marry your stepfather and move you out of that somewhat affluent Southside Chicago neighborhood – the same neighborhood our current President calls home.  In retrospect, you think you were falling in with some boys who would have led you into a life of thuggery.  You were only 8 at the time, so I’m not sure how true that is, but our move to California did change the scenery along your road to adulthood.

In California you grew up, not without your bouts with racism, to be sure, but in an environment that was designed to keep you safe from the lure of urban gangs and a life on the mean streets of Oakland.  My white husband, who adopted you and made you his son too, was proud to be your dad and gave you (and me) everything we could have wanted.  You were a black boy in a white world with a black mother and a white father. It wasn’t until last year that you told me how much taunting you suffered in that town.  It nearly broke my heart.

You thrived anyway, took advantage of many of the opportunities you were afforded, excelled in baseball, graduated from college and landed in Hollywood.  Your life, in many ways, sounds like the plot of one of the movies you could do.

For years I have patiently and quietly waited for the day I would become a grandmother.  You are my only chance for that, since you are my only child.  I know you have always dreamed of having a little girl to spoil and a little son to mold into another man of many talents.  But you have been very smart in the conduct of your adult life.  You believe you should be financially stable before you marry or bring children into the world.  I taught you that, so I have no one to blame but myself.

I saw your hoodie picture on Facebook the other day.  It was in tribute to Trayvon Martin, the youngster in Sanford, Florida who was shot to death while walking through a gated community, apparently doing nothing but breathing while black.  Your face in that hoodie reminded me of what I have been thinking since I heard about young Trayvon’s fate.  It could have been you.  It could have been your cousin, my sister’s son.  It could have been his 19-year-old son, who is about as threatening as a baby bunny.

If you were to have children, what chance will they have of the kind of life you’ve had or I’ve had?  Will it be possible to shield them, even if they are raised in gated communities, away from inner cities?  You and I both know that even in a state as liberal as California, there are places not too far from what we consider safe towns that are teeming with racists.  Remember Concord?  That was only 20 minutes from where we lived, but a young black man was actually lynched there in the 1990s.

I try not to be an alarmist, but I have been wondering if I still think bringing new life into this screwed up world is a good idea.  I still worry about you, and you are a grown man more than capable of taking care of yourself.

But what can your children expect?  What will you tell them to do to ensure themselves a decent life?  Will there even be jobs for them to work?  Will there be enough food produced in the world to feed them by the time they are grown?  If you have a son, will he be hunted like a deer in open season?