This weekend, we attended a local conference for LGBT parents and families, and I spoke on a panel about interracial couples and inter-cultural families. At some point, I found myself speaking less as a gay dad and more as a Black man raising two Black sons, and wondering aloud just how I would prepare them for the reality of what they will likely face as Black men, and how I will prepare them for that without catalyzing what I know is an inevitable loss of innocence; the same innocence I love to see in them, and so want to protect as a parent.
But I know that I will be doing them a disservice as their father if I don\’t prepare them for the reality I\’ve experience myself, and that they will each have to face in their own time. It\’s no surprise that in the middle of the panel discussion, I remembered an exchange I had with my own father.
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