Black Fear and Black Parental Love

“The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction…” – Down At The Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind, The Fire Next Time

Let’s talk about raising Black children through fear and how it compromises the love and acceptance these children experience during their childhood. We are not talking about the familiar fear when someone realizes there’s no money to pay this month’s bills or when a person sets off on a new entrepreneurial venture…No, this fear is a crippling one that infiltrates the very corners of the Black American existence. A fear that fuels a community’s need to protect or shield little Black boys and Black girls from experiencing the wrath of White expectations by playing right into those marginalizing ideologies. A fear so fervently revered in Black cultural movements that scholars gave a name to the phenomenon: The Politics of Respectability. A fear that consequently morphs a parent’s love into a conditional love that is predicated on the child’s adherence to the parameters set for their behaviors, aspirations, and dreams.

For [some] Black people there is a fear of “stepping beyond our bounds.” We are raised to remain IN BOUNDS, never to step too close to the line of self individuation nor too far from the prescribed monolith that is Blackness; that version of Blackness initially shaped by our ancestors’ experience as inferiorly sub-human, an experience-shaping archetype passed on to present-day Black Americans as though it is the only available legacy. Take my youth for example…

As a child, I was obedient to my Blackness, unwilling to disrupt my parent’s  acceptance of me and doing so without being aware that it muffled my innate desire to take on this world as any white child already could. There was a tugging, always a tugging, that occurred whenever I was censored, or chastised for being “too free.” 

As I grew older I began performing minor rebellions in response to that “tugging” feeling, which turned my relationship with my parents into an intricate dance. They worked tirelessly to protect me in ways that felt unloving to me; monitoring my entire being.  “You can’t wear the same things [insert white child’s name here] wears” “You must work twice as hard to get half of what they have” “ I’m not paying for an art degree” “Don’t speak too loudly” “Don’t speak out of turn” “Mind your manners” “Never forget to be humble” and “Be the bigger person…ALWAYS”; all code for “Mind your blackness.” In turn, I reluctantly stepped out of their carefully crafted respectability fortress, vocalizing my disdain for the imbalanced power structures and finding different ways to reach my truest self. I chose my voice but could never shake the empty feeling I felt because I believe that I was compromising my parents’ love for me because of my instincts, instincts that, as you can imagine, began to feel very wrong and obstructive.

Now, despite the fact that I am encroaching on my 30s, and despite the gratifying evolution of Blackness in this country, my parents often regress, displaying the same fear-based reaction to my newest desire to write my most inner dark-skinned, educated, Black woman thoughts for the world to see. “What will you write about?” “How will that affect you down the road career-wise?” “Be careful who or what you discuss.” “This may be interpreted as the words of another angry, bitter Black woman” “Are you sure that you are prepared for the potentially negative responses that these writings will bring?” Instinctually, I recoiled at the barrage of questions and retreated to that space in my head that alerts me, the Black woman, that I have gone too far outside my prescribed casting and reminds me that I have an “obligation” to “stay in my place.” Saddened by the prospect of not responded to my yearning to speak my truth, I [gently] rebutted them [in my mind] and reasoned through the words of warning. Moments like these still bothered me and for the longest time I could not figure out why… 

James Baldwin says “[a child] reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.” For a child, fear colors their parent’s love as being conditioned on how well the child conforms because to not conform places a child in a space not controlled by their  parents. And the reality is that in this country, unfortunately, if a Black child leaves this safe place created by their parents the results can be catastrophic. However true the reality, these pejorative reprimands handed down to a child are universally interpreted, even if only subconsciously understood, as a condemnation of their very being. Because to a child, concern is read as disapproval and attempts to protect a child from themselves in view of white people reads as shame in who they are or who they want to become.

The “Blackness” narrative is more about what is acceptable to receive white love rather than living in and learning through the love of SELF. The truths written about by well known authors and evidenced by our black parents,  relatives or kinfolks’ actions are forever permeating our decisions about who we want to become in this world and who we ought to become in this world. The difference in these two valuations for black children is so devastatingly great, and we are continuously accosted with the responsibility of having to reconcile, in a negative way, the two…even as adults.

***This is essay is written from my personal experience as a Black child of Black parents, and also as an observer of others who were once Black children, whether through reading or living. Jame Baldwin said it best… “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” I hope that by writing about my experiences and observations, that one less Black child (or young adult) feels that the rigors of expectation in their childhood is/was an isolated incident; a childhood that would prompt a triggered response of “F that” to a phrase like “When they go low, we go high” because of the drumming up of negative feelings associated with having to be a model Black person.