Until they don’t. When they get some length on those legs and those baby curls morph into a mass of naps, suddenly everything is new. Where once admirers saw cuteness, there is only threatening stereotype, and all that brightness that made those adorable little black boys irresistible is overshadowed by the dark cloud of assumptions, disdain, and, yes, racism. This is neither speculation nor conjecture from an overly sensitive mom; it is verifiable, indisputable fact. Just a few years ago, headlines blared with news of three different studies that showed that black boys as young as ten are mistaken as more than four years older, are more likely to face police violence if accused of a crime, and are often denied the assumption of innocence typically afforded children when they act like, well, children. It is how Tamir Rice, a baby-faced twelve-year-old kid playing shoot-’em-up games with a toy gun, can get gunned down by police within literally seconds of their arriving on the scene, with the shooting officer saying he thought the boy looked like a twenty-year-old. It is how Trayvon Martin’s killer can get away with claiming a skinny kid wearing a hoodie in the rain, with Skittles and iced tea in his pockets, was a threat. It is how a fourteen-year-old Emmett Till could end up at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River, beaten, broken, gouged, and tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan, and his killers could not only be acquitted of his murder, but go on to brag about how that child “got what he deserved,” without any legal repercussion. In other words, our babies—our sons—get buried in an avalanche of low expectations, negative perceptions, oft-quoted statistics, and outright danger that denies them their basic humanity. And it is hard as hell, as a mother of a black male, to stand there with your baby in your arms, watching the clouds form and the sky turn gray—hearing that rumbling thunder, knowing that an immense, intense, never-ending storm of criticism, judgment, and outright abuse is about to rain down on your son’s head.
For Marcell, it began as early as kindergarten, before he’d barely opened his first pack of crayons—before, even, he could write his own name. It happened right after school, when the sun is high and the kids are restless from a long day’s work and the teacher opens the door and shoos her young charges outside to let off a little steam before pickup. From what I gathered from the story, a few kids from his class were jumping around, plotting out a game of hide-and-seek, when Marcell tried to join in on the fun. “Can I play?” he asked.
One of his classmates was quick to answer: “No,” he said, without even a moment of hesitation.
“Why?” Marcell asked.
“Because you’re black,” he said.
Confused and upset that he’d been barred from playing, Marcell tucked himself away in a quiet corner of the play area until I arrived to pick him up. I could tell by the way his shoulders were hunched over that something wasn’t right. “Hey, baby, give me some sugar,” I said, waiting with outstretched arms for my afternoon greeting. “How was your day? What’s wrong?”
“They said I couldn’t play with them,” Marcell offered in the most pitiful little baby voice I’d ever heard.
“What?” I asked, my happy-to-see-you face quickly morphing into a furrowed brow. “What happened that they said you couldn’t play with them?”
“He said it’s because I’m black,” Marcell said, just as pitiful as could be. “But I don’t understand, Mommy, because my shirt is green, my pants are blue, and my sneakers are white.”
“He said what to you? Who said it? Show me,” I demanded.
Marcell pointed in the direction of the cubbies; at the end of the tip of his little finger was the boy, a Middle Eastern kid with a thick accent and skin as brown, if not more so, than Marcell’s, and his mom, who was helping him gather his things. “Wait right here,” I told Marcell. “Don’t you move.”
I caught her in the parking lot, tucking her son into his car seat. “Hey, let me speak to you for a minute,” I said. I’m sure the fury in my eyes was the impetus for her to close the car door before she gave me her full attention. I let her have that, then confronted her head-on. “How dare you!” I snarled. “What are you teaching your son at home that he’s bold enough to say something so foul to my son?”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What did he do? What is going on?”
“Your son told my son that he couldn’t play with him because he’s black,” I said, seething. “What are you teaching your child at home? Because I know this is not his fault. He’s a five-year-old child. That’s the kind of mess that gets taught to kids at home.” She raised her palms in surrender, trying to interject, but I wasn’t about to let her have at it. I was too disgusted to entertain explanations and excuses. “My son would never say something like that. He’s being taught to love and respect all people, no matter their color, and what I will not stand for is for some child to refuse to give him the same respect on the playground. How’s your son going to make my son feel left out anyway? They got the same color skin!”
I can’t even begin to recount 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.