Lessons On Parenting Black Males, From a Brown Mom

It has become painfully clear to me that, had I continued to parent my boy like he wasn’t a black kid, I would be doing a massive disservice to his safety. Parenting black males is more complicated than I realized until recently. After my editor and friend over at SpanglishBaby asked me to voice an opinion on the Zimmerman case from a Latina mom’s perspective, after I wrote My Blinders Are Off: What Trayvon Taught Me About Parenting, after HLN’s Raising America picked up the piece and featured it on their homepage, I am still sickened at what I have to tell my child in order to keep him safe. Being black and staying alive are all of a sudden parts of my parenting perspective.

Parenting Black Males

Yes, I understand that many black boys get killed every day in America. They are murdered by other black and brown people. The amount of inner-city violence that I have seen with my own eyes, while working in the trenches of California’s finest “hoods”, is heart-wrenching. I’m sure those occasions will only continue to come up. Because, for as much as I hurt for my husband and his plight as a black man, seeing Trayvon’s dead body, mangled with the rife of a bullet on that middle-class sidewalk utterly took my breath away. Not as a wife, or some black rights advocate, but as a mom. To a black boy.

Here’s the thing – we do NOT live in a ghetto. We do NOT live in the hood. We live in a beautiful suburb of Las Vegas, Nevada. A place where, thankfully, there are enough weirdos that race problems (though present) don’t feel like an issue all the time. There are black and Latino people around us. My daughter will be starting a Christian private school in the fall, where she will undoubtedly be the only black kid in her class.

I could deal with being “the only” for the sake of offering our kids the best we can afford. But at what cost? Will someone see my teenage son and accuse him of… walking down the street with candy in his pocket? Will he be a smart-alick or play his music too loud as teenagers do? And will he legally be shot dead because of it? These are the thoughts going through my mind today, and every day since the verdict. Nevada is one of those states that anyone can just carry a gun around in public, so that idea is not so far fetched.

I am still horribly sickened by this case – this murder. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy; the jurors tried the case according to the law, but the law used to try this case sickens me. Even more so, those who can rationally say race was not a factor are those who sickens me the most. Whether we are talking about race relations, motherhood or politics, people who don’t know what they don’t know are the scariest kinds of people. And let me tell you something I DO know, if you aren’t black (and especially if you are not “of color” – meaning white), you have to really go out of your way to even get a glimpse of what it might be like for a black person in this country. If you think you know, you are being painfully naive.

To begin to understand, we need to throw out this dream of color blindness. I wrote about my feelings on raising kids to be color blind (the post that was featured on BlogHer: Raising Your Kids Color Blind And Why I Wouldn’t Dare). To sum it up, if you think I should raise my kids colorblind, you’re out of your mind. According to this mom, the brown in this family symbolizes a host of cultures and heritages that will not be blinded. Don’t even think of taking that away.