Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope

by Jasmine L. Holmes

With you, though, all I could do was marvel the first time I looked at you. Just moments before, you’d been in my womb, inhabiting my body, the only home you’d ever known. I had wondered what you would look like, what your voice would sound like, what it would be like to finally meet the little boy who wriggled under my hand when I placed it on my belly. And there you were.

you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. You still are.

They can’t have you, but I get why they “want” you no matter how awkwardly they express it.

Aesthetically, my love, you are undeniably pleasing. Those big brown eyes, those pursed little lips, the earnest set of your brow—I love your face.

I never wept at Emmett Till’s story until you arrived.

When I first taught his story as your mama last year, he was no longer simply a dapper, smiling young man to me. He was a little boy. A beautiful, bright-eyed little boy. The same kind of little boy that I shush at the end of a long class period or hold in my arms after nine months of pregnancy. The same kind of little boy as your brother.

Emmett Till was not beautiful to the men who lynched him. He was not a child. He was not full of potential. He was an object of hatred, and that hatred sparked murderous consequences.

They saw an animal in need of a lesson.

I see a handsome young man with the sweetest smile.

They saw a threat to their w...

I see a young boy who escaped the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, dest...

More than three thousand black people were lynched in America following the Civil War.

The ultimate goal was to forever alter the perception of the other black boys left behind. Like a terrorist attacking the heart of American ideals of safety and security, lynch mobs used fear and the threat of violence to keep black boys in check. They existed to embed a vein of fear and inferiority in the complex identity of black youths in America.

And for so many years, in so many ways, it worked.

But the possibility of violence against your body is just a small part of the fear your mother holds for you. My son, what I fear most is the way that the politicizing of that violence, and of the black bodies it sometimes harms, will impact your mind. Will you become desensitized by the death of black men, shrugging off injustice because it makes you uncomfortable?

Will you become paralyzed by the death of black men, locked in an endless downward spiral of fear and grief?

feel a burgeoning burden to teach you how to walk the taught tightrope between knowing the media’s tendency to manipulate you with political statements and grieving the slaying of an image bearer.

As people clamor for more details, respect the fallen. Take a moment to mourn the fact that lungs the Lord filled with air have breathed their last breath. Remember that this human being was someone’s son, brother, father, lover. Take a beat to pray for those whose lives will never be the same.

And so are the many others you may be tempted to distance yourself from in the days to come.

You are beautiful, not because “black is beautiful” is an in idea right now, but because you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

You are not more beautiful because you are black, but part of your unique beauty comes from the rich heritage that the Lord has woven into your melanin.

He made you a little black boy on purpose. He stuck you into this particular moment in history with intention. I am not your mama on accident.

What they didn’t understand was that distilling this boy’s rude act to a calculation dehumanized a knuckleheaded teenager who could have just been having an off day.

But because this boy was black, he was lumped into a well-worn stereotype that sees black people not as individuals, but as a calculable monolith.

Emmett’s brown skin was beautiful, but it did not make up all of who he was. And neither does yours.

As you grow into the young man God has purposed you to be, I am so excited to see all of your unique aspects fitting together for his glory.

you to be a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. But whatever you end up doing, you will be remarkable, because we...

I want you to remember that you are more than a black body. You are more than the threat that some people will immediately perceive you as. You are more than the victim or martyr others are so eager to take you for.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made. And you’re precious.

You are precious because God breathed life into you in his divine timing and for his divine purposes. He created you in his image. And you’re beautiful.

And the message my mother got from her grandmother growing up was that the lighter the grandchild, the more beautiful.

This blatant display of favoritism carried down into our generation with an older relative who exclaims every time she sees me, “Have you gotten . . . darker?” Gram, who married Pappy—and will call him a “giant of a chocolate man” to make you gag someday—taught me to say, “I sure hope so. I’d love to be chocolate.”

have diversity by the bucketfuls and a blue-eyed grandfather to prove it. But while my mother and her sisters grew up with the not-so-subtle message that brighter skin is better, I grew up with parents who showed me the beauty of all sorts of shades.

Growing up, I can’t say that I ever wanted to be lighter skinned than what I am. My mother wouldn’t hear of that. But I was surrounded by people who claimed to be colorblind, which kept me from knowing

that being black was beautiful.

even when they weren’t cruel, they made me feel “othe...

In trying not to draw attention to my skin tone, I became ashamed of it for a season.

From your Uncle Judah’s fair, Kennedy-half worthy skin to your Uncle Micah’s enviable chocolate hue, I fell in love with the beauty in my younger siblings and started to see the beauty in myself.

Roll of Thunder.

My skin was created for God’s glory. And while I could draw myriad Punnett squares and talk Mendelian genetics with you all day, it is only the uniting beauty of the gospel that gives us a handle on just how lovely diversity really is.

I serve a God who has called “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9) to partake as sons and heirs in his kingdom (Gal 4:7). I serve a God whose love for us transcends lines of gender, class, and ethnicity and who allows our horizontal love to do the same (Gal 3:28). I serve a God who put chestnuts, chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, and pecans all under the same roof just because he’s creative like that.

serve a God who sees chestnuts when he looks at my skin, and who put them there to be unabashe...

And it’s okay to note mine too.

you are part of a gorgeous tapestry the Lord is weaving in his creation. Whatever your shade, hair color, eye color,

or stature, the Lord gave it to you on purpose and for his glory. I lov...

I may or may not have started praying for it the minute I fell in love with your mahogany-hued daddy. And I’m not on...