Quarantine Series Part 2: Being Black in Quarantine

The moment you think things are moving forward, you are reminded you are black. In a pandemic when I am already worrying about enough. I now have to have the dreaded conversation that I am sick of having with my three black sons.

See, it is easy for you to tell my people to ‘get over it’ because it does not affect you. However, when you are subjected to videos like Ahmad Arbery who was hunted and murdered like game, the story changes. He was chased like a hunter chases a deer. Chile, let me tell you I am tired of having this conversation.

When I have to tell my son daily you have to be better, and still, you might be a target because people fear what they don’t know and frankly they fear your greatness. In this piece, I reflect on my life lessons of being a black woman and my daily fears raising my black sons and how videos like Ahmad Abrey remind me we still have some work to do. As a mom, I have always worried about how I will someday have to explain to my sons that we don't actually reside on Sesame Street. In fact, statistics show that the older he gets the more likely it is he will become a victim of violence. I'm raising a veritable sitting duck in the society we call home.

If my black sons have to learn that society will hate them, they should hear it from me someone who loves them unconditionally. I always wondered when was going to be the best time to discuss race with my children. It seems like in an era of social media and everything being televised, my hands were forced to talk on subjects rarely spoke of in white homes at six.

I introduced them to Malcolm X, not the Malcolm that J. Edgar Hoover classified as a terrorist, but the Malcolm X that employed people, helped people kick addictions, the Malcolm X who told black men to love their black woman and be proud of who she was and who they were. Let me talk to you guys about something that will be in the next DSM because it is something that affects black people everywhere. No matter what class or economic status, we are reminded we are BLACK. Black has always been used to be negative or degrading.

Race-based traumatic stress is a traumatic response to stress following a racial encounter. Robert T. Carter's (2007) theory of race-based traumatic stress implies that there are individuals of color who experience racially charged discrimination as traumatic, and often generate responses similar to post-traumatic stress. Race-based traumatic stress combines theories of stress, trauma and race-based discrimination to describe a particular response to negative racial encounters. I am reminded of an incident when I was bused out of my inner-city elementary school in Miami, Florida to an affluent part of the city known to locals as Aventura for gifted children. Although I was accepted into the program, I never was “accepted”. I always had to prove my intelligence.

I remember telling my mom in the 3rd grade I wanted to drop out after being called a monkey and told that I smell. I know its easy to say words don’t hurt, but the fact is those words shape my response to being a black woman. Recently speaking with my fellow friend and clinician, Shola Toussaint, she made a valid point by saying, “When race is being used against you on an institutional level, that’s being raped and violated by the institution supposed to protect and serve you.” Imagine this being your daily life. FEAR of what today brings because you are different. Then they say, ‘be an upstanding citizen’, yet you can jog, get mauled, and your perpetrators can go on living their life.

I remember the first time I spoke to my older two sons on this topic, I have not had the conversation yet with my 3-year old. The question that always arises is ‘could I bear to watch their eyes lose some of their glow’? The first story I shared was that of Emmett Till. I showed them pictures and we read reports of the child’s murder. In 1955, the year Till was killed, the structure housed a cotton gin. It is likely the place where Milam and his conspirators retrieved the 75-pound cotton-gin fan that they tied around Till’s neck with barbed wire to weigh him down after they threw his corpse into a nearby river. It was a lot to explain to my sons. I showed them any of the gruesome pictures that made Till’s murder internationally known. I simply told him that some men had killed a boy because they thought people with brown skin had to be controlled, violently if necessary. My sons grew very still as they listened.

“But it’s not like that anymore, is it?” he asked. “Well,” I replied, “it’s complicated.”

A lynching may be especially difficult to explain to a child, but I am far from alone as a parent who struggles to talk to her children about race and its grim history in this country. We take great care to teach our kids to treat others kindly, to share, and to forgive. But teaching them about America’s racial history is another project entirely. It’s a project that every black home has the burden of sharing and teaching with all the other traits of what a good person is. Is it fair that the knowledge that I have to burden them with slightly burns a little of their light and takes away their joy? Every parent—whether deliberately or not—sends a message to his or her children about race, but the legacy of race-based chattel slavery means that for black parents the process of deliberation is unavoidable and particularly fraught.

Every black parent has to have “the talk,” about how to survive an encounter with the police. If I am being honest there is not just one talk, there are several. There’s the talk about how people will fear you and consider you threatening no matter what you do because you are a black man. The talk about working twice as hard for half as much. The talk about how black kids don’t get second chances. This seems grim, but imagine being the parent that has to have these harsh conversations and see the light of your children being dimmed. This why it is so important for me to praise them because the world is coming for them and coming to destroy them.

I remember I spoke on last year being the hardest year of my parenting career. I saw a teacher purposely try to destroy my son. He received straight A’s but how she hurt him was giving him C’s in conduct so he couldn’t get honor roll, an academic-based award but she used behavior against him. His ‘bad’ behavior was asking questions, questioning things she said - all things of a positive learner, nothing was ever disrespectful. My son had his father and me to protect him. I took steps that she didn’t. I had him privately tested by a psychologist. I suggested he was gifted she looked at me as if my black son couldn’t be. To their surprise, his IQ level was off the charts. I demanded he be placed in gifted classes but he was denied.

I told him we don’t run we confront, and there will be a lot more Mrs. Moore’s but he has to remain who he is and never let someone get him out of character. And even then, no matter how carefully parents inculcate a sense of racial awareness, there is the ever-present threat of bigotry’s random brutality. To be a black parent in America is to be in a state of constant vigilance. All parents know this caution to some degree—keep sharp objects out of reach, make sure they don’t play in the street, check out what kinds of friends they’re making. Black parents, on top of that, have to worry about shielding their children and healing them, from antiblack racism. They also, in having these conversations, often have to revisit old traumas of their own: having the word nigger hurled at them, having lost out on jobs or promotions because others viewed them as less competent than their lighter-skinned peers, having been pulled over simply because of their skin.

I, for instance, dread talking with my son the first time he goes out on his own with a group of other black and brown-skinned boys. Having that conversation will take me back to the discomfort of how, when I was a kid, I was followed with my friends simply because we posed a threat because the color of my skin was of a darker hue. Honestly Loves, this is breaking my heart. I woke up in sweats because the talking, the preparation, the vigilance is endless—and, frankly, exhausting.

I start erasing their thoughts of invisibility by telling them they have to see their greatness even when the world won’t acknowledge them. I tell them they belong in every room. I try to find children’s books that don’t feature black kids only in supporting roles or in the ghetto. I have to consider not only the racial composition of my child’s classroom but whether the leadership is diverse and racially sensitive as well. It makes me mad to think that I have to explain all of these harsh realities to my child while others are subtly teaching their children ideas that continue to dehumanize people of color. I imagine them around the dinner table, parroting tropes about black laziness and welfare fraud, talking of “those people” and asking why they don’t just help themselves. Some wonder aloud whether the country would be better if we had never had a black president. Maybe there is some cosmic parenting dynamic at play: For every adult who is trying to train his or her children to confront racial intolerance, there is another teaching his or her children how to perpetuate and preserve it.

I want to tell my child that today life is better for black people. It is certainly different. People of color can enter any public building. We can make meaningful movies that bring in a billion dollars. We can even be president. At the same time, I have to prepare my black sons for a nation still gripped by the myth of white supremacy. The best I can do, I’ve concluded, is err on the side of honesty. If my black sons have to learn that society will hate him, then let him hear about it from someone who unconditionally loves them. For our sons own good, my husband and I have to tell them the bleak truth that everything is not equal. They will have to know that they will not only be a potential victim of this HATE, but will also be seen, in the eyes of many, as a suspect--for nothing other than the color of his skin. That hanging out with one or more of his black friends outside will turn "the guys" into "a gang" and, depending on who's watching them, "a threat" – and it won't matter if they're carrying basketballs and water bottles, or a bag of skittles.

My son will have to be taught that he can't be "mischievous" like his white counterparts are allowed to be. Carrying out a dare to steal a candy bar for a white friend might garner him a "time out," and that same misdeed could get my son shot. A teenager's "joy ride" is just that for a white boy, but translates to grand larceny for my son. As bleak as it may sound, he has to be taught--for safety sake--that racism exists.