An open letter to my black children

Dear Sweet Baby Loves, 

                I love you more than life itself. I love you with a ferocity that is recognized worldwide as its own category, a “mother’s love”. An unwavering, incomparable, deep abyss of love that nothing or no one, including yourself, can remove you from. I love you because every fiber of my being demands it on a primal level. I would die for you, I would kill for you, I would burn down cities and fight battles against innumerable odds for you. I would build nations for you, I would give my life in service of yours, I would change the world for you. Know that with every breath you take you will always have someone in your corner; I have your back, front, top, bottom and your every side from the first breath you take until your very last. I am the true definition of ride or die for you. Always. Always you have me. There will be times when you feel I am your enemy because I promise I will set boundaries and teach you lessons you don’t want to learn. I will be your parent first and your friend second. I will not be the “cool mom” who lets you go and do whatever you want, when you want because my job is to protect you and mold you into a decent human being. I take my job very, very seriously. 

                Some lessons I will have to teach you will be hard and unfair. Some will be lessons that every person has to learn but some will be solely because of the color of your skin. That breaks my heart. The sentiment “breaks my heart” is so unbelievably inadequate but it’s all I’ve got. The fact that I’ll have to tell you that no matter how a police officer treats you, you must go beyond complying and pander. You MUST. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong and have truth on your side, you must be respectful to the police no matter what and my love, my baby, my heart…sometimes that won’t be enough. For whatever reason there are people on this planet, often in positions of authority that believe because you have a lot of melanin in your skin you are lesser or you are scary. The way you dress, walk and talk will automatically slate you into a category of people upon initial sight. You cannot wear what people in black culture wear because frankly it’s not white enough. You must wear hoodies with caution and you are not ever allowed to put the hood up. Do you know I’ve witnessed your father run in the rain and still he will not put his hood up because he’s a large, black man. Do you know that I insist he wears a full, bright orange, reflective vest when he runs outside so that he is not misconstrued as anything but a jogger? Because of deeply ingrained racism someone may see a black man, jogging at night, with a hoodie hood up and automatically assume he is something he absolutely is not. It is not a risk I am willing to take. These are things that you must consider before you live your everyday life, you do not have the luxury of being complacent. You are not allowed to play with toy guns outside of our 6 foot, privacy fenced in yard. Ever. Because even before puberty you will be considered a “super predator”. Simply by existing you are viewed as a possible threat and even a toy gun can cost you your life. 

                If anything ever happened to you, please know that I will raise 18 different kinds of hell! I will take it to every media outlet on the planet. I will organize protests. We will march. We will hashtag your name and scream for justice! I will make them see that you were more than just your skin color, that you were my BABY! My son. My daughter. My love…My heart. The sad reality is that despite my best efforts it probably won’t matter because baby, they can kill you and they can get away with it. It happens every day. It’s not fair. It’s not. But screaming about fairness won’t keep you out of a grave. It will just leave me standing there with a picket sign, in my white skin, safer than you ever will be. 

                Sometimes I feel ill-equipped to fight this battle or to speak out against racism because who am I, a white woman, to speak on things that I’ve never experienced? Then I’m forced to consider that just because I haven’t experienced them does not mean they don’t affect me to my very core. Racism affects me and I will rail against it at every opportunity because, my sweet baby love, it affects YOU and YOU are the most important thing on this planet to me. So who am I to speak on racism? Who am I NOT to speak against it? An even better question is why is everyone not speaking on it? Why is everyone not outraged? Who am I not to speak against injustice? Who am I not to spend my life educating everyone I possibly can that racism absolutely still exists and is present in everyday life? Do I drive people crazy with my incessant talk of it? Do I get accused of pulling the race card too often? Do I lose friends and alienate family over it. Yep, I sure do. That’s not my business though; my business is you and making a better way for you. I will fight every single battle thrown my way, I will pick up the gauntlet every time and I’ll even go looking if it means making a better world for you. Even if I only get through to one or two people, I will consider it all worth it. Maybe those 2 people will get through to 2 more and so forth and so on. Most days I feel defeated and exhausted like I’m raging against a machine that has no eyes or ears. Most of the time, I sink lower in the mire of ignorance because the majority of people either turn a blind eye or actively deny there could be validity to these issues. They are the worst kind of racists, the ones who refuse to believe something outside of their own experiences could have validity. They are dangerous, my love, steer clear of them if you can. They will hurt you or justify others doing so and will never believe they’ve done anything wrong. They will justify keeping their head down in the interest of keeping the peace but the truth is you don’t matter enough for them to disrupt their peace. If their child faced an injustice they would do as any parent would and cause major unrest in order to make things right but they cannot be bothered to do so for you because it’s uncomfortable. It takes time and effort to recognize the systematic racisms that are sewn into the fabric of our society and they don’t care to make it priority enough to even recognize it. 

                If I could take this from you, I would. If I could bear it for you, I would. I hate that you will have to deal with issues that I never did just because you’re black. I hate it. It enrages me. I feel so incredibly helpless when I struggle to get others to just SEE but they throw excuse after excuse at me. As a mother it is the worst thing in the world to stand back and be helpless as your child faces a monster. It pains me to say this but your life would be much easier if your skin was white. All of that being said you must never let this hold you back in life, don’t let other peoples hate and ignorance define you. You were raised to hold your head high, to say yes ma’am and no sir, to look a person in the eye and give a firm handshake. You were raised to be BOLD and embrace your unique beauty. You, my love are absolutely exquisite in every sense of the word. You are loved beyond measure, you are important and you are worthy. Never forget it. 

                                                                                                                       Love,

                                                                                                          Your forever devoted mother