What White Parents Raising Black Children Need to Hear Before It's Too Late
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I grew up Black in a white family in Lincoln, Nebraska, raised by parents who loved me completely and still missed almost everything I needed them to see. Nobody handed them a manual. And nobody handed you one either. But there are things you need to know before your child figures out you don't.
I spent thirty years in education as a teacher and a principal, and then as the founder of an executive leadership coaching business for school leaders. I watched what happens to Black kids in rooms built by and for white people. My own childhood didn't include a single person at the dinner table who looked like me. At 49, I finally sat across from my birth family for the first time and understood what had been missing my whole life.
I Was Your Black Child is that story, and it's also a direct letter to you. There's no research study in here and no academic argument about transracial adoption. This is the truth about hair nobody in my house knew how to care for, a conversation about race that never happened at our kitchen table, and a protection that disappeared the moment I stepped out into the world on my own as a Black teenager.
Kids like me get good at hiding the hard parts from the people we live with. Most parents never find out, and that's why I put every chapter together the same way. Each one starts with a piece of my story and ends in a section called What This Means for Your Child, where I talk straight to you about the kid you're raising.
This isn't about being a bad parent. It's about being a more honest one, and I wrote this book because you need to hear what I wish someone had told my parents.
If you're raising a Black child and you love them enough to want the truth instead of comfort, this book was written for you.
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Michael Gaither was adopted at eighteen months old and raised by a white family in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was usually the only Black person in the room, at church, at school, and on every vacation, in a house where race was never talked about. At forty-nine, he finally stood face to face with his birth family.
He spent thirty years in education as a teacher and a principal, then built an executive leadership coaching business for school leaders. Along the way he sat with hundreds of kids wearing the same labels he once wore, and he could read what they were hiding because he'd lived it.
He founded Beyond the Moment Adoption Studio to give white parents raising Black children the honest guidance his own parents never got. He lives in The Villages, Florida.
The First 5 Signs Your Black Child Is Carrying Something They Haven't Told You is free. I lived every one of those signs as a kid, and nobody around me ever named them.