It is not an easy time to raise children—nor, increasingly, young adults. My son is sensitive, perceptive, and intellectually awake to the world around him. He reads the present moment clearly, and the illiberal turn in our politics does not escape him. If anything, his instincts run to the left of mine, which I did not think possible.
He is also mixed-race, which complicates matters in ways that remain stubbornly American. I am African American—slightly more than a statistical majority—and his mother is white. He does not look easily classifiable. Dominican, perhaps. Or simply “other.” He could be stopped and asked where he was born. The irony is that much of my family arrived here before 1800, largely in chains, with the usual tangle of ancestry that history leaves behind.
We are alike enough that I cannot dissemble with him. He would see through it immediately.
My own mother—eighty percent white, twenty percent Black—born in 1940 in Ohio. She was the one sibling who could not reliably pass. That mattered. It meant fewer jobs, fewer doors opened without explanation, fewer places where she was simply welcomed. She lived at the mercy of well-meaning people and indifferent systems. And yet she endured. She raised a family. She built a life. Today she is retired and widowed, living independently and surrounded by children and grandchildren who know her strength.
That history informs the advice I give my son.
Yes, there is danger now—real danger. Trumpism, authoritarian habits, the normalization of white supremacy: these things make the country less safe, less decent, less predictable. But there was always danger here. The present has not invented it; it has merely intensified it. Thirty percent, perhaps. Forty. I do not pretend to know the exact figure.
What I tell him is this: you still have to live. You still have to build, love, participate, and contribute to equity and freedom when and where you can. You do not wait for the country to become just before insisting on your place in it. You insist on that place through engagement, responsibility, and persistence.
Will that be enough? I honestly do not know.
But history suggests that withdrawal—whether through despair or silence—never is. Progress has always depended on people who stayed in the argument, even when the argument was unfair. Courage, after all, is rarely the absence of fear. It is the decision to remain present anyway.
And that, for now, is the best advice I have.