LIFE
Raising a Black Boy in America
From the day you find out that you are pregnant, you begin to share your life with another person in the most intimate way possible. What you eat, how you live, how you take care of your mind and body, are all important to the survival of the human being forming inside you. You take care, visit your doctor’s, and prepare for this new life that is coming to the world through you.
And then your child is born and for a while is dependent on you for everything from eating to staying clean. You do the best you can to protect your child, provide for them, and do all that you know how to do to keep them alive in body and spirit. All the time you know that one day they will be out of your view, all on their own to navigate new vistas in their life, to explore the paths that their destiny has charted for them. You pray that they are able to fend for themselves when they are on their own, outside of your control, and grow to a full age to see their own children, if they decide to have them. These are the fears and dreams of every mother, but in America, mothers of black boys have an added fear – the fear that they will be psychologically traumatised or worse, killed, simply because of the colour of their skin.
In 2012, I was in Florida, counting down the days to my expected due date when Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, who claimed that he was defending himself and his neighbourhood, and got away with taking the life of an unarmed 17-year-old black boy. Despite being acquitted of the criminal charges against him for killing Martin, Zimmerman threw more salt on injury in 2019 by filing a civil suit against Martin’s family and the prosecutors in the criminal case for defamation, abuse of civil process, and conspiracy.
In the years before and since Trayvon Martin was killed, many more children have lost their lives simply because of the colour of their skin. How does one overcome in a society that sees you and automatically assumes that you are a threat? How does one survive in a society where the systems that are created to protect ALL citizens are used as a weapon against black people.
I want to instill in my son the values of hard work to achieve the best that the world has to offer. But I cannot guarantee him that attending the best schools or getting a good job and affording a good life will make American society treat him as an equal with his white peers, or give him the same grace as they do his white peers. We have seen young black people harassed by white people for existing in an environment that those whites feel are too superior for a black person to exist in. No matter how hard you work, in the mind of some people, a black person is undeserving of certain stations in life. It’s as though the physical ‘Whites Only’ signs came down, but they remain in place in the minds of those who believe that America is for whites and whites only.
White privilege is a real thing in America. White Americans recognise this and some even use it to their advantage. How else do you explain the boldness of Amy Cooper, calling the police on a black man who dared to call her out for breaking the rules in a public space.
We admonish young children and say, ‘stay out of trouble,’ but in the black American experience, white trouble finds you even when you are minding your business in your own home. White trouble not only seeks you out, but it also attempts to tar your reputation and demonise you after invading your space. There are too many of these incidents, and it feels like there is always some half-assed attempt to justify the unlawful killing of a black person.
More than 50 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that his children ‘…will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,’ we are still dreaming. The dream is not yet a reality for black children in America. How long will it take before we can stop dreaming and start living in the reality of our dreams?
We have a long way to go. When President Barack Obama won the elections to hold the highest office in America, I thought that the dream was becoming a reality. Sadly, not so. What we see in America today, with the tacit support of President Trump, is an emboldening of those who see the audacity of the black man’s dreams of an equal existence in American society as a threat to their unmerited privilege. It feels like there is an attempt to remind black folk of their ‘place’ in America. But black people in America have come too far to accept that. Those who do not like it can go back to where they came from. This land is not native to white people. But today we all find ourselves on American soil as American citizens governed under one Constitution that guarantees equality of all persons, and equal protection of the laws to all.
The Declaration of Independence states that, ‘…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ This is the premise on which the United States of America was born. It is on this premise that we wish to exist in America. It is on this premise that we want to raise our children. It is on this premise that we will continue to not just dream, but fight for our black children to pursue happiness without fear of losing their life or liberty.
