“Make Your Peace With The Chaos...” Childhood While Black
(Let’s talk a masterclass of a scene in Black writing and acting. Shout out to Shonda Rhimes, Kerry Washington and Joe Morton. My chest was TIGHT.)
“All my life I’d heard people tell their Black boys and Black girls to “be twice as good”, which is to say “accept half as much”… This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good… It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the Black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.” -Ta-Nehisi Coates
I resented growing up that that’s how my parents- who loved me deeply, who wanted, despite their worst decisions, for me to succeed- made me feel. So many talks and lessons that I just could not give a shit about, because they suggested that I wasn’t my own person and the world wasn’t my oyster. But I resented worse, becoming an adult, realizing that they were right. They could have gone about it without the trauma, but they were right that there was a world waiting to consume me at the smallest fuck up, and my age would not have protected me from that.
I don’t personally believe that any nonblack writers will ever get the inner dynamic of Black parenting and childhood precise. You will get close with your studying, and your observation of our media! But you will not be able to… feel within you the pattern, the rhyme and reason the way you would with your own culture and upbringing; you will not be able to empathize you to me, the way I can to another Black person. This isn’t a bad thing- you can do your best! But there will be times where it is not your place to depict certain things, especially if you have to ask how to do it. That’s fine! A parent loving and protecting their child is not something that is dependent upon race!
I’m not going to explain to you ‘how to write a Black child’, because the idea that somehow we would innately behave differently from any other type of child is… Racist. You can ALREADY write a Black child! They’re kids! They’re gonna behave how kids do; they’re gonna lack maturity, be silly, not know things, know too much, think they’re immortal, be terrified, rebel against their parents, cling to them, be a tad bit callous because they don’t get the consequences of their actions, grumble over small things and think they’re the end of the world, want the latest cool toys, play games, laugh, scream, and live. They’re kids, and they deserve to be kids.
And that’s what I’m going to explain here, is how the experience of childhood while Black is affected by the world around us. That they’re kids, but they won’t always be perceived as kids. That we don’t usually get to have that childhood every child SHOULD get, because the world demands that we grow up very quickly or treats us as if we’re already grown. And how you, as a creator, an audience member, and a person, need to recognize within yourself and your media when you are falling into that trap of believing that Black children are not children.
The Talk
“The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a Black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other Black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful- the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find excuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible to you- the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way you never will know. You have to make your peace with the chaos…”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me is “the talk”, an explanation from a Black American father to his son about how to deal with the violence of the world against Black bodies- including his. Honestly, it’s a brilliant reflection of everything I could say, which is why I will be quoting it throughout. I would highly recommend reading it. Maybe then you’ll understand more, when you write these kids- hell, even Black characters as a whole.
“Tough love” is a part of that resilience that we all have to have to survive the world we’re in, and that has manifested in many (not ALL) Black households and in how our children are raised. I think every community of color has a version of this, of how whiteness is the standard we have been forced to live our lives in comparison to. It is a visceral, heartbreaking thing to have to tell a child, that their life has been deemed lesser from birth and they will have to fight to not only survive, but live joyously despite that.
Examples include Caleb McLaughlin, who played Lucas in Stranger Things:
“My very first Comic-Con, some people didn’t stand in my line because I was Black. Some people told me, ‘Oh I didn’t want to be in your line because you were mean to Eleven.’ Even now some people don’t follow me or don’t support me because I’m Black. Sometimes overseas you feel the racism, you feel the bigotry. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about and for people to understand, but when I was younger it definitely affected me a lot.” Caleb stated that all that he has had to deal with has inspired him to use his platform to share love and positivity: “My parents had to be like, ‘It’s a sad truth, but it’s because you’re the Black child on the show'…because I was born with this beautiful chocolate skin, I’m not loved. But that’s why with my platform I want to spread positivity and love because I do not give hate back to people who give hate to me.”
And the scene between Rio and Miles, in Across The Spiderverse:
The way many of you are often confused as to how to not write a stereotype, how often you all are frustrated and annoyed with me saying “you just have to study it and become aware of what you’re seeing”… That was our entire lives! It took me until I was a freshman in college to realize that 1) my family had been right every time I denied that racism was a factor in how I’d been treated poorly and 2) everything I was seeing now, with my fresh eyes released from ignorance, were things I’d already seen. Even without being willing to call it racism, I’d already had to internalize and learn how to dodge and weave through a world that hated my Blackness. I thought that was normal! I had to realize that no, white kids did NOT have the experiences I had growing up and as adults they wouldn’t share them either!
So when you try to ask me for specific scenarios to avoid you looking like a racist creator, I want you to know that there’s no one right answer because it’s a chronic pain. It will show up in endless ways and in your experience (or lack thereof), you will figure out how to maneuver through it! You start to recognize the pattern- hopefully with support around you- and that is different than just answering a one time “got it right” question. Either you learn to recognize the pattern, to Play The Game, or you may fall victim to it. It’s something that children have to learn, that you have the privilege to choose to learn!
“Either I can beat him, or the police.”
People tend to think that Black parents are more violent, including Black parents! Similar to the internalized homophobia that I discussed in a prior lesson, this mindset is unfortunately rooted in slavery and state violence. There is an idea that if I, as your parent, make sure you are Good, Compliant, Righteous, and Fearful of Harsh Consequences, that there will be no reason for the State to punish you because you Follow The Rules and Are Afraid Of Authority.
“Maybe that saved me, maybe it didn’t. All I know is, violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire… What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to the streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I know mother’s who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood out in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth grade class… We were laughing, but I know we were afraid of those who loved us most.” -Ta-Nehisi Coates
It really ought to be studied how Black people laugh to repress so many things that sadden us. It’s a level of cope and survival that doesn’t always help. Nonetheless, I hope we continue to laugh defiantly.
Anyway. Is it true that this strategy works? Contrary to many elders (hell, even Gen X and Millennial) beliefs, no. It’s a form of victim blaming. The people and the state who want to enact violence upon your Black body wants to do so based off of its own interpretation of you, no matter what you’re doing. Even if you WERE doing something wrong, you still wouldn’t deserve police brutality!
Many of us grew up hearing that the reason white kids become White Adults is because they never got whooped as children. The action? Still wrong! Correlation is not causation; there were many things that contribute to white supremacy and entitlement that allow white people to behave the way they do! The theory behind it, however- that there would be swift and possibly violent consequence for doing harm to someone else, because you don’t have the right to treat others that way, but you are protected by privilege anyway- isn’t necessarily incorrect.
We Protect Our Children
Now don’t get it twisted. We do love and protect our children. The stereotypical rhetoric that Black fathers aren’t present (not true, actually more present than white fathers), that Black mothers are ghetto welfare queens (there are higher numbers of white people on WIC and stamps), or that we grow up as ‘superpredators’ is incredulous, and quite purposeful.
We DO have parents and guardians and they DO love us! There’s a reason that historically- as things change with time- childrearing was a communal effort. Aunts and Uncles and Grandparents and Cousins! Black Cincinnati has popped off multiple times about protecting our kids this year, with violence if necessary!
Lincoln Heights- Everyone discusses the swiftness that the Black community pulled up armed to fight the Neo-Nazis who showed up, but often leave out the context that the Neo-Nazis planned on ‘protesting’ in front of a school! They were pulling up to threaten the children of the community, and the community moved with haste to arm themselves and pull up in response to protect their kids!
Rodney Hinton, after watching the footage where his son Ryan was murdered by police, snapped and retaliated by killing a police officer. Regardless of how ‘right’ it is, that is not the action of a man who didn’t love his child!
There is no group that doesn’t have issues within their community about raising their children, but that does not mean that any of us deserve the label of unloving or incapable. Historically, part of that stems from the belief that Black people are inherently lesser, and will breed inferior children with inferior skills to do so. The Mismeasure of Man discusses how Black people were deemed less intelligent, and therefore would raise less intelligent children that were meant to be fieldworkers and servants, or else would commit crime. The destabilization of the Black family unit is also not an accident, I will refer you to The New Jim Crow as a reference on that topic, and how it intertwines with the “war on drugs”- i.e. the war on getting Black and Brown adults into prison for labor, thereby splitting apart families.
Adultification- Grown Enough to be A Threat, Not Respected
Very often Black children do not get the benefit of the doubt for their actions; very rarely does anyone check in to see how they are feeling, what might be causing them to act the way they are. This is because we stop being children in the eyes of society far younger than white children; we don’t have traumas, we are threats.
When this white woman decided to call this five-year-old a n****r for taking her child’s toys, she did not see him as a child that was misbehaving. She saw him as subhuman, that “if he didn’t want to be called a n****r, he shouldn’t have acted like one”. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised to support her and her actions, by the way. I worked at a children’s museum where a three-year-old Black toddler was accused of trying to “flirt” with this angry white man’s toddler. At THREE. That’s how early the projection of those ideas start, when you’re used to treating Black children not as children, but as future threats.
And it’s a toxic cycle, because when I am treated like I’m an adult, I have to navigate the world as an adult. But I’m still in the body of a child, with all of the lack of freedoms of a child, but the consequences of an adult. Think of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, of the Black middle-schoolers arrested at a pool party, thrown violently to the ground.
Or in school! Some of the hardest moments is dealing with racism from people who are supposed to be guiding you. Especially if they treat you as though you will never be good enough. If the people teaching you show you a world you’ve never seen, have acted like you’re not good enough to see… why would you be motivated to go? But at the same time, school is listed as the Way Out, the Way Up, to be someone that is… Acceptable. But acceptable isn’t always truth!
Think about how you were taught about Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X. There’s a section in Between the World and Me, page 32, that sets a good example. Think about how when you went to school, learning about Black people that didn’t comply was seen as a bad thing, a threat. That the only Black person that was acceptable was… A Good Negro.
There’s a video I saw a long time ago; I’m not going to link it because it’s personally traumatizing for me. But there was a Black high-school girl being beaten and thrashed around by a school police officer for ‘not being obedient’. The reason she was being petulant is because her grandmother had died, and she was in school instead of dealing with it. And instead of any of the people who were supposed to be guiding her asking her, ‘hey, what’s going on that you’ve been so stressed’, the teacher called the school cop for her disobedience. I’m talking dragging her by her hair and beating her. And people acted like she deserved it! Imagine how the other Black children felt in that room, witnessing that!
Now: if this is how the world responds to you and your pain… why would you trust it? Why would you ever think ‘oh if I’m in danger, let me call the police’ or ‘my teachers care about me’ or ‘my pain matters’? Why would you respond to this world with anything other than rage and defensiveness?
“Fast” - Adultification of Black Girls
“Motivated by jealousy and humiliation, Mrs. Flint takes Jacobs into her bedroom. Her actions, according to Jacobs, are a knee-jerk reaction to her husband’s sexual pursuit of the young slave girl. She pulls her aside, hands her a Bible and says, “Lay your hand on your heart, kiss this holy book, and swear before God that you tell me the truth,” the truth being that Jacobs has not succumbed to the sexual advancements of Flint. At this point in the narrative, Mrs. Flint, consumed by her erotic obsessions, comes to fixate on Jacobs. She imagines Jacobs as a seductress, assumes her guilty before the young woman can prove her “innocence,” and then wants all of the sordid details, which cause Mrs. Flint to alternately blush, weep, groan, and moan. She seems to blame Jacobs for her degraded state.” - The Delectable Negro
That leads me into another specific example of Black girlhood. Black girlhood is… it is not protected. I don’t know how else to put it. I say it so often that I wish that I had grown up feeling safe, rather than being raised to be resilient.
Mapping the Margins, written by Kimberle Crenshaw, is where the term ‘intersectionality’ was first coined as a term to explain the intersection of race and gender in law and policy, specifically domestic violence and rape. It’s 60 pages; a short but harrowing read. Growing up as a Black girl, into a Black woman, is realizing that your identity makes you less valuable. You are a threat to the safety of ‘Blackness’ (Black men and boys) if you dare speak up about experiencing misogyny and gender-based violence. You are a threat to the safety of ‘womanhood’ (white women and girls) if you dare speak up about experiencing race-based violence amongst women. You exist at the intersection, where everyone will claim to work in your favor while completely leaving you out.
Tying into that stereotype of the Jezebel, there’s an idea that Black girls are older, less virtuous, of more sexually open- often blaming the victim rather than the source. You’re “fast”. More mature than your brothers, meant to be mothers and carers, yet not to be listened to or valued for your opinions. A sexual threat to other women and girls and a sexual temptation to men and boys just by being present and unashamed. You’re the reason that ‘no one respects the race/women’.
There was one of those ‘controversial’ FB posts where toddler girls had ‘boyish’ haircuts with designs, and people were saying that they ‘looked too grown’. How does a CHILD, let alone a BABY, look too grown because she has a star-shape shaved into her head? And how does that not apply to toddler boys of the same age? Mr. CBCs mom, she was told she couldn't be taught dance properly, she was sexualized for having “too much ass” when she was nine years old and wanted to go into dance in her creative arts program. Her own teachers said that to her. Nine!!! An entire career path, marred, because at such a young age she was discouraged for her potential sexuality (She still dances, for fun). So you’re old enough to be sexualized, but not old enough to be asked about your feelings about things and to be punished for being ‘disobedient’… And this is how it will be. Good luck!
No one deserves that. And within my community I pray that we continue to acknowledge and break that cycle. That we raise our Black girls with kindness, gentleness, and protection. Being ‘tough’ might be cool on you, but it’s a requirement for us- and personally, I think I’d like to rest far more.
The Well-Intentioned Reverse
There is also a history of Black parents minimizing and diminishing the skills of their Black children so as to make them seem less threatening to white parents, decreasing the chance of that resentment falling back on them.
This desire to be ‘piteous’ in response often results in the also-racist infantilization of the Black community. The white savior is the best example of this; of someone speaking over the group because they ‘know better’. You may have heard it before; the person who sounds like they want to be antiracist, but they speak and they’ve made the community sound like a bunch of savages who’ve never known better and just need to ‘listen to this and it will be better’. Either way, I’m not being treated as an equivalent!
Another example of this is Black adults, particularly Black men, being referred to by a diminutive. For example, calling an elderly Black man “boy”. Calling any Black man “boy”, to be honest, as both a possessive and as a denigration. It says “I’m above you”. I know people don’t usually mean it this way, like maybe you’re trying to say it in the way you say “my boy such and such” or “my guy”, but like… watch how you’re saying things.
Black and Queer Children
““My family feels like this is a decision I made… They think, ‘You’re already black, why would you want to draw more attention to yourself?’ But it’s not a decision. It is who I am. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” Suffice to say that I understand his family’s reaction. The sensibilities expressed by Brockington’s family, particularly in the use of “already black,” underscore how blackness and transness are tethered in the contemporary landscape in terms of visibility, in which the form of “attention” directed at black and trans people is frequently articulated through policies, such as House Bill 2 (HB2), which passed on the one-year anniversary of Brockington’s death, on March 23, 2016.”- Black On Both Sides
My mother, long before I told her I was bi, told me she wouldn’t want me or my brother to be gay because it was ‘already hard enough being Black’ and she didn’t want us to experience that. And like…. Yeah, she’s right, but that’s not what any kid wants to hear when they’re looking for a safe space to be themselves.
I already discussed the intersections of Blackness and queerness in the gender/sexuality lesson, how being queer isn’t any safer or more welcoming while Black than anything else. So I’m not going to repeat myself. However, as a child, there’s an extra layer of vulnerability because you live in a world with essentially no saying power. All the pressure that one might experience as a child while queer, and while Black, and just as a child in general, will collide, and you can only hope there’s a supportive, healthy environment for them.
But there ARE Black queer children that are loved by their families. It might not be perfect, but it’s real.
The Wades (top left) are TEXTBOOK excellent parenting when it comes to raising a Black trans child. They’ve been nothing but vocally supportive for Zaya’s journey and it makes me smile every time I see her. A true example of “he’s got the spirit”; while his mother has been generally terrible, Lil Nas X’ dad (bottom right) has been openly supportive of him, to the point of almost getting violence involved when homophobic Boosie kept talking shit about his child. Sade (top right) is an iconic singer, with a very lowkey and understated media presence. For her to come out with an entire song and video to support her trans son Izaac, means a lot. Marlon Wayans (bottom left) is very open about his ongoing journey and how he originally struggled to understand Kai, but eventually opened up and realized that that was his child and he loved him no matter what.
The Joy of Black Children
I love seeing Black children happy. It bothers me so much when people are buzzkills about the joys of children, but it especially pisses me off when people are annoying about the happiness- and loudness- of Black children. It’s already hard as fuck enough out here, it’s not going to get any easier, and now the kids are supposed to be miserable too? Let the kids be happy! At any point this world might decide that they should be murdered for the audacity to be alive and Black; I want them to cheer and clap and dance and sing and blast music as LOUD as they can because they are here too and they have every right to be! Take YOUR miserable ass on somewhere instead, and consider why happy Black children bother you so much. Maybe consider that YOU might be the threat! You want to fight somebody, pick on somebody your own size!
I wish Black children had more safe spaces to go outside the way we used to. Yet another thing being lost. But, I will say one thing that I don't recall seeing other groups playing the way we did was hand-clap games and double dutch! So I wanted to show you how even this has a history!
Join us for the screening of the documentary short, Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games. A talkback with its directors Joe Brewster an
Looking back at the outdoor activities we grew up enjoying and the intergenerational work being done to maintain them.
(I could never double dutch. Too scared of the rope (dodges tomatoes))
God knows how important it is to see ourselves in media, of seeing ourselves be kids, of seeing experiences like our own. Sesame Street was created for urban, Black and Brown children to feel comforted, to learn at home, to understand the world around them. Generations of kids benefitted from that.
That leap of faith from Spiderverse was SO IMPORTANT to see. That Miles is not falling, he’s rising. He’s reaching the potential he always had within him to be who he wants to be. That YOU, TOO can wear the mask! I literally cried when I saw it won an award; I can only imagine how important it’s going to be for little children to see and internalize that moment.
But what I think is often underplayed is that the only reason Miles took that leap into greatness was because Jefferson supported him. Of hearing that his parents love him, that they wanted what’s best for him, that “you’re on your way”. Miles didn’t make that leap on his own, he made that leap after hearing that no matter what, his father loved and was proud of him. Every kid deserves to hear that, from their families, their community, and from their society. That you are valued, you matter, and you can do it.
The Children Are Always Ours/Conclusion
James Baldwin once said that being Black means being marked from birth- not adulthood, birth. But he ALSO said that the children are always ours! The odds are against these kids the moment they pop out Black (really while they’re in the womb) I really want it to sink in for all of you that right now, at least when it comes to these children, it’s not about you. It’s about them. I want y’all to sit on the reality of these kids and the world they live in, and make the choice to do better. We deserved it, and they deserve it too. An interaction with you might set the pace for how they perceive this world; how do you want it to go? Why do you think you have the right to perceive this child as less deserving of understanding and grace than a child that looks like you? Did you even notice you were doing that?
When you write and watch these Black child characters, I genuinely want you to think of their humanity. That belief will show through your actions, because you know full well by now that it’s the thought that counts, but the action that delivers.
