what she said back because I didn’t give a damn about the words coming out of her mouth. I just wanted to make clear that there would be some hell in the city if her kid ever spoke to my kid like that again.
Later, after we got home and unpacked his book bag and had a snack, I sat Marcell down and tried to explain to him in black and white the complicated Technicolor of race. “Baby, you’re cute right now and the world loves you, but when you get bigger you’re going to become a threat.”
“What do you mean, Mommy?” he asked, all that innocence shining like halo light around his head.
“Well, there are people in this world who do not like other people because they’re black. And that’s an awful thing because skin color shouldn’t matter, baby. We like anybody who has a good heart, and it’s a good thing to let them play hide-and-seek with you, no matter their color.”
Marcell looked down at his hands and arms and then back at me, seemingly more confused than he was before our talk. “But my skin is brown, Mommy.”
“And it’s beautiful, baby,” I said, shaking my head and giving him a warm smile. “Your skin is brown and beautiful.”
? ? ?
To this day, even as a twentysomething young black man who has felt the sting of racism and witnessed firsthand its effects on how we relate to one another as humans, Marcell still can’t wrap his mind around someone hating him because of the color of his skin. It really messes with his mind because he’s spent his lifetime surrounded by a virtual United Nations of friends from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds and has always embraced them for who they are, what they’re interested in, and whether they have an intimate human-to-human connection, rather than what they look like. Indeed, his best friend growing up was a French boy named Anton, whom he adored not because of his skin color or background, but because they liked the same things: video games and climbing trees in the backyard and riding bicycles with the wind whipping in their faces. This is Marcell’s way. The way it should be.
We mothers, the ones charged with the care and upkeep of black boys, know the score. Black single moms are constantly beat up for our choice to have our children, but it is our boys who feel the impact of that blunt force. The blows come wrapped in a sledgehammer of statistics and pathology, with society tying our sons’ skin color and the marital status of their mothers to a heavy weight of low expectations. It seems as though everybody is standing around waiting for our boys to prove that black boys, especially those raised by single moms, have a propensity for violence, are probable criminals, lack education, are more likely to take illicit drugs, and are more likely to suffer from mental disorders—and on and on. From the moment the doctor smacked Marcell’s butt and said, “It’s a boy,” I knew I had to come primed and ready for the fight. I was never scared of the prospects—never bowed to the fear that comes with raising a black son in a society that is prone to think the worst, rather than the best, of him. Instead, I steeled myself for the challenge, with this one true mantra: “I’m going to raise a helluva black boy.” That’s the armor I carried with me—the determination to prove every last one of those statistics wrong. I was blocking bullets aimed at my son’s abilities and character early and often. Like the time when his third-grade teacher suggested I put him on medication because she thought he was too hyper in class. I saw nothing wrong; as far as I was concerned, my son’s behavior was no different from any other creative, inquisitive, and energetic eight-year-old boy who would much rather jump around and be stimulated than be confined to the same seat for hours on end, stuck in the muck of long, boring lectures and tedious assignments that felt more like busywork than actual learning. When she mentioned attention deficit disorder and slow-tracking my kid, I gave myself two choices: either choke her out or pull my son out of the school. Thankfully for her, I chose the latter.
Near the end of eighth grade Marcell learned firsthand how his skin color made some people unfairly perceive him as hostile. That happened when he was