©copyright August 2014 Karsonya Wise Whitehead

Dear boys:

I would like to write you a love letter about peace/ of a time when black men, like black panthers, roamed free/ of a place where black bodies were not endangered and black life was not criminalized.

Alas, I am not old enough to remember life back that far (if it ever even existed in this country).

Neither am I old enough to remember life before Brown.

I suspect (though) that it was not much different than it is now in places like Ferguson and New York and Florida/ places across America where the crime of breathing while black is still punishable by death.

I used to be afraid of white sheets (wouldn’t even use them on my bed) ‘till folks traded them in for blue uniforms/ and then traded their wooden crosses for bully clubs.

My heart always skips a beat when a cop’s car is behind me while I’m driving at night/ and though you are not old enough to drive, I am already frightened by the day when you are stopped for the crime of driving while black.

There are days when being black in America overwhelms me and makes me want to spend the day in bed/ and times when being the black mother of a black boy in America makes me wish I had enough money to move you somewhere where I could keep you safe.

Excerpt from “Letters to My Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America” (Apprentice House, 2015) https://www.apprenticehouse.com/?product=letters-to-my-black-boys-raising-sons-in-a-post-racial-america