letters to (a) son
letters for our boys
The idea for this post came to me while I was suffering in the heat on a run. So. If some of it is jumbled, you know why. Ideas for my writing never come out of nowhere, but instead are a reflection of the strands of work that I am reading, listening, and reflecting on at any given time. (This Substack has the word “musing” in it for a reason.) I wanted to write a letter because of the beauty of the words that
pens for his own son on his Substack. I wanted to write a letter because of Imani Perry and her work in Breathe as she writes a letter to her sons first and foremost…and…if I could be bold…to sons like me who will never meet her. I wanted to write a letter because of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and the heartbreaking truths he has to share with his own offspring. The letter is a necessary genre of literature, especially for Black peoples seeking to bond to community and share truths that may not be easily accessible if written outright. So, I write today as a commitment to all of the sons, particularly the Black ones, who will grow up in a country that has been radically shaped by white supremacy. I write as a commitment to communal care and love that fiercely reaches out for knowing and being known. Here is my letter to Black sons who are coming to maturity in a chaotic age.
Dear ones…you know who you are,
I was reading a book recently, that I hope you get to read some day, Jennifer Nash wrote the (redacted) out of this book1 overall, but chapter three is sitting with me so powerfully that I felt I had to write something to you all. She talks about the power of the letter individually and communally. She goes on to talk about the ways that Black feminists have had to capture their griefs, losses, and hopes within the form of the letter for the sake of reclamation and preservation.
The sting of loss is all around me (genocides, a polluted planet, bigotry, capitalism) and I don’t know how to accurately convey what it has been like to be a son of Blackness that has grown up the ways that I did. How I survived crushing poverty. Being called the N word at a very young age. (Perhaps I will share that story with you one day because I remember it very clearly.) How we went through a global pandemic that nobody seems to want to talk about or remember. People died. We were scared. I went without a hug for over a year and a half. We lost everything it seemed during those years and…we pretend that it never happened. I don’t think we learned much as a country. I can’t speak to what the world learned. I know as a country that anti-Blackness never took quarantine. Never took a vacation either.