As a mother I knew that there would be questions my son would ask me. I knew there would be a chance that I couldn’t physically protect. With every day he was slipping further away and I had to learn to honour and embrace the day. There is no weight as heavy then the one we carry when we raise our children. Our biggest fear is just getting them to stay alive. That fear never truly leaves us. It has never left me. Mind you he is only 3 so I still have many years to go before I have to worry about that day when mommy is no longer cool and he gravitates towards his friends. All I can do is teach him the right things and hope that is enough for him to make the right choices.

Reading has come apart of my routine almost as much as getting out of bed in the the morning. Gravitating towards non fiction I look for clues that may help enhance the living experience for my son. I had an idea of the mistakes I made growing up but what about all the countless ways we can go off track. All I could do is open up my mind, follow my heart and have faith that it would be enough. Of course I do not avoid any topic and I cross many genres which lead me to read “Between the World and Me”. It is a book about the misuse of power that rules like an iron fist and leaves a whole race scrambling out of fear. I couldn’t imagine with all the grotesque ways that men have failed us (I use the term men loosely) that the colour of my skin would almost serve as a hunting permit to feed the most racist fiends. Like rats laying in wait in the street corners they prey on their victims thinking that they are more superior because that is white history will teach us. We live amongst others that don’t even have he same luxuries as me. they get to live in a world like it is a death sentence where they are always walking on death row. Like an inmate whose last days are number you don’t realize that day is coming till you are strapped to a chair being forced to confess to sins you never made.

It makes me angry that out of 328 million we are farther away then ever before. Maybe there is some sort of sanctity that comes when setting slaves free but what does that mean when you still prevent them from living a life free of the chains that we brought their ancestors here on. My family has never “owned” another human being. All the work we did on our farms we did with our own hands free from being lashed, raped and beaten like common cattle. This is how humans were treated. We ripped away their lineage and sold their offspring to the next highest bidder. Imagine the trauma coursing through the life line as your next of kin is carried off into the sunset never t been seen again. Their is no history until emancipation. Who would keep records of the people they tortured and killed. What I think is incredibly humbling is what these men and women endured was far worse then if they were fighting for their lives in concentration camps run by the Japanese or Germans. What the POWs had a sense of and carried in their heart until they were lead to the firing squad was a sense of hope. There was a saviour out there and it came in the form of their country. If you were a slave in America you had no hope. If you did the only bit of it that would seep in would be that the roll you stole to feed your family wouldn’t be noticed and you wouldn’t be forced to endure the lashings of an enraged white beast.

If you are of white ethnicity I am not trying to shame you. I am asking you to pen your eyes. I am asking you to search inside your heart and ask yourself the hard questions does your son and daughter deserve to die for just being. It is easier for me as a mother of a white boy. It is easier but there is still fear. My fear is limited to child predators and heaven forbid the evil that arises in some children. You know the ones. The ones who lure our children away in the wee hours of the night saying they just wanted to see what it was like. The likelihood of my son being stopped by a cop is just as good with one major exception. When the people in blue go to question my son they keep their guns in their car. There is no need to feel fear in a group of teenage boys, unless of course they are black. If they are any other colour then white, cops will call in for back up with guns drawn with the mentality of shoot now and we can set up the evidence later if we have to.

Human life should never be disposable and we should all be valued the same. How come my son gets to be blessed and live easier just because he was conceived inside a white womb? The manner of conception is the same no matter which way you succumb to it. Yet my son will have the chance to thrive and yours, well yours will be set up to die. How in this day and age does this even make sense. It is like we fool ourselves saying our beautiful friends of coloured are being represented in the media. Just look at mainstream television and look at all the ways they tried to interject colour into their day to day existence to make it seem like we have changed.

“Between the World and Me” was written in 2015 and it almost foreshadows what is to become and what has already happened in the Spring of 2020. The book is a letter written to his son where it almost seems like he is apologizing for his son being born in the body that he has been given. It talks about Prince and Trayvon like their murders at the hands of police just happened yesterday. The murder weapon that claimed the life of Trayvon is actually up for sale on e-bay. This is the world that we live in. That I have decided to raise my son in. Yes his life will be easier. Just ask Jacob Blake and how I wished you could have asked George Floyd who will always be remembered as the man who lost his life as he exclaimed to police as they were kneeling on his neck that he couldn’t breathe. We live in and amongst this chaos but because of who my ancestors are it will never directly affect me. If what the world needs is a hero then it is up to all of us stay at home mom’s to raise our children to rise to the occasion. We may not have the number now but if we teach our children the right moral high ground maybe we can change the course of human decay. I will never be a part of this incestual pull to rob good women of their handsome sons. I will learn all that I cnan about life and human existence. I will hope to raise my son to take the high ground and hopefully save others along the way.