What I Wish My White Parents Had Known About Who I Was

I used to stand in front of the mirror and cry. Not because something bad had happened that day, just because I was looking at myself and I couldn't make sense of what I saw. I didn't look like my mother or my father or my brother or anyone at school or anyone at church. I was a Black kid in Lincoln, Nebraska surrounded by white faces everywhere I went and the face in that mirror was the only one that didn't fit.

Nobody ever sat me down and helped me understand that image. So I stood there alone and tried to figure it out by myself for years.

That is where your child's story is being written right now, not in the big moments but in the quiet ones you don't see.

What was happening that nobody named

My hair was its own kind of pain. We had no Black hair care products in the house, and the salon my mom took me to was staffed by white women who had no idea what to do with it. I'd wet it down before trying to comb it just to soften how much it hurt, and it still did. At one point I asked if I could get it straightened so it would stop hurting to comb. I wanted to look like the kids around me. I was in junior high and I was already that far gone, and nobody around me understood what that meant.

I learned early how to manage myself in white spaces. When the pressure got too heavy I disappeared to my room or to the alley behind the house where I could just exist without anyone watching. But when I had to show up and be present I shaped myself into whatever version of me made the people around me most comfortable. That was how I survived. It worked just enough to get me through but it cost me something every single time.

Race was simply never discussed in my home. It wasn't that my parents avoided it or shut it down, it just never came up. And that silence sent a message I absorbed without anyone ever saying a word. The things that never get talked about start to feel like they don't matter. I learned that early and I carried it a long time.

What would have changed things

If someone who loved me had said my name and my race in the same sentence with pride it would have meant something to me. I didn't need a formal conversation or a big moment. I needed someone at the kitchen table to make it clear that being Black wasn't a problem to manage quietly, that it was something worth understanding and worth talking about openly.

Someone asking me what it was actually like to be me in the world I was living in would have opened something up. Because that question alone would have told me someone in that house saw what I was carrying and that it was safe to say something.

Everything in our daily life reflected whiteness back at me. There was nothing in that house that helped me understand or connect with who I actually was, and after a while that starts to do something to a kid.

During my 30-year career as a teacher, principal, district leader, and principal coach I watched kids in school buildings do what I had done as a child. They shaped themselves to fit whatever room they were in and made the people around them comfortable at their own expense. Most people around them saw behavior problems or a bad attitude. I saw kids surviving the only way they knew how, and I recognized it because I had done it myself.

What I need you to hear

I reunited with my biological family at 49 years old. I spent the first half of my life not knowing where I came from, with no honest conversations at home about what it meant to be Black in the world I was living in every day, and nobody around me who looked like me or could help me make sense of any of it.

Your child may be sitting in that same silence right now.

Loving your child is not the same as knowing what your child needs. You can love someone completely and still miss what is happening right in front of you. That is not a flaw in your character. It is a gap, and gaps can be closed.

I was that child and I know what he needed. I wrote this so you would know too.