How Do I

"Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.”    ~Richard Wright, Black Boy

My sweet black boy…

The moment you were conceived I was charged with the responsibility of raising an African American male in a society that seemed to have little or no value for the wealth of gift and tenacity that is the soul of your existence.  You have inherited the shadow of enmity upon your life simply and solely because your skin is cast with a dark hue.  I was beset with the thought of the ensuing challenge of revealing to you the binary nature of a black and white world and what the unsightly implications are for a young man like you.  How do I explain “driving while black?”   How do I justify the sheer viability of “liberty and justice for all” when economic peonage is a reality in our inner cities?  My colored child, I bemoaned the day I would have to say that there is seemingly an unspoken caste system in which “the untouchables,” young black males endure an existence that continues to be calloused like the hands of their cotton picking American forefathers.  How do I explain the “strangeness of fruit” in the genteel south and why America’s estranged Uncle, Jim Crow was once offered a generous helping of freshly baked apple pie?  How do I go farther to say that our many Samsons’ crown and glory was sheared every time they were relegated to the farm animal status of stud?  How do I explain to you, my Negro boy that there are some trace elements of this past that render it necessary for me to instill in you a unique code of conduct, the fundamentals of black male etiquette to save your life from judicial inequity, media buffoonery, and scholastic dilapidation?  How do I speak plainly to your innocence and state, 'Nigger' is more than a word, it is a belief system?  How do I... 

  “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home.”   ~Matthew 13:57