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

by Jasmine L. Holmes

The already being that Walter Wynn Holmes is an image bearer, invested with identity, dignity, and significance, and that in God’s economy his brown skin is nothing more than a glorious display of the creative purpose of the Father.

That, above all, our goal would be to see brothers and sisters of every tribe, tongue, and nation dwelling in unity, not by flattening God-given ethnic and cultural identities, but by living in the gloriously diverse reality of those identities for his glory.

To believe the best of our brothers and sisters in Christ, even when we don’t quite understand where they are coming from. To take the emotionally charged rhetoric of the world and supplant it with the unifying language of biblical truth. I want us to be slower to accuse and draw lines in the sand where the Word of God has done neither.

Without the balancing influence of the gospel of Christ, we will become unable to empathize with other believers whose struggles and personal triumphs differ from our own. We will become unable to lay aside those differences when appropriate and embrace our sameness as blood-bought children of the most high God.

I hadn’t ever really considered that God became a baby—a fragile little life wholly dependent upon his mother, Mary; or that Mary became a mother—a fragile human being wholly dependent on God to protect and nurture the baby inside of her.

Is this even true?

sepulcher.

Even as I’m knocking on thirty’s door, some see my life as more hidden in Pappy than hidden in Christ.

You don’t know it yet, but you’ve experienced this too. Right after we announced that we were having a son, more than one person asked, “Are you going to name him Voddie Jr.?” To them, it seemed like a completely innocent question, or even a joke. But to me, it felt incredibly disrespectful. I have a husband whose identity was completely bypassed in the name of celebrating celebrity.

I don’t want you to despise being known as one of us, but I do want you to know that you are created with individual worth and value before the Father. You were not made to bloom in our shadows.

Many people fail to consider that children aren’t meant to remain in the shadows of their parents for the rest of their lives. They’re made to be launched from their homes where they were trained to bring the good news of Christ Jesus to a hurting world.

You have the benefit of my energy as well as the handicap of my ignorance.

I hope you will look back on your young mama with grace. But I also hope that you’ll look back on me and see a firm resolve to love you well. I hope you’ll see some ways that loved you right. I hope you’ll see a quickness to repent of the things that I got wrong.

But there is no better preparation for that than to know that you are not defined by the cruelty that some in this world wish to offer you. You aren’t even completely defined by your mama’s love. You are defined by the God of the universe who purposefully gave you that beautiful brown skin for his glory. No matter how the world might perceive you, hold your head high knowing that you are matchlessly loved by your Father in heaven.

Adam and Eve held within them the promise of the nations —the promise of diversity. And it was good.

It truly is amazing. I was making a person. Or at least, I was the vessel for the person that God was making. He was crafting you each and every day, monitoring and guiding your explosion of cells, pouring into you the way he has poured into each and every person he’s created since the dawn of time.

The awkward pause that followed was burdened with a history of buying and selling, but your daddy handled it well by politely smiling and nodding at the bumbling older gentleman. “He’s priceless.”

He was not a child. He was not full of potential. He was an object of hatred, and that hatred sparked murderous consequences.

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

My fear for you, my son, is not so much that you will be lynched like Emmett Till. Make no mistake, I will train you—as I was trained—to respond to authority in a way that will make you appear as nonthreatening and compliant as humanly possible. And I will hope and pray that this compliance will serve as some kind of barrier against the brutality that your young black form may incur. I will watch every news story of a black man gunned down by police with a twinge of fear, wanting so badly to trust that those charged with protecting our communities would not harm you without just cause, but fearing every scenario where they might.

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? I truly hope not.

Then, about an hour later, someone sent me a tweet calling your grandfather a coon for his response to a past police shooting and sarcastically hoping that my husband wouldn’t be unjustly gunned down. I sat in a hotel room, four weeks postpartum, nursing you and watching as tweet after tweet poured in to analyze the situation, treating Philando not like a slain man, but like a pawn in political maneuvering.

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.

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.

You are more than the victim or martyr others are so eager to take you for.

Your great-great-grandmother was a mulatto woman. She spent her youth passing as a white lady and married the fairest black man she could find. When she became a grandmother, she would always give her lighter grandchildren (of which Gram was one) a Kennedy half dollar coin when she came to see them, and she would give her darker grandchildren a quarter.

I remember the first time I watched the documentary Dark Girls, which highlights the fact that the favoritism of light skin is still rampant in our culture. And it’s not just among black women. We all want to be bronze beauties of ambiguous origins.

I got weird comments about my lips, my nose, my hair—even when they weren’t cruel, they made me feel “other” and not pretty.

Mildred D. Taylor described Papa’s skin as the color of pecans, and I never forgot it.

I serve a God who put chestnuts, chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, and pecans all under the same roof just because he’s creative like that.

My white friends see the difference in their hues, from alabaster and olive tones to enviable bronze tans. They talk about their “brassy” blonde hair and platinum hues, their sea-blue or blue-green eyes, because they note the differences.

The same people who barked at me for my wide-eyed enthusiasm about a black president and who assured that representation absolutely did not matter were not above using representation when it suited their own political ends.

Race does not matter to this person until it can be used to lambast the black community for its shortcomings.

Because both sides understand that representation does matter.

Abortion is heinous, my son. Not only that, but it inordinately affects black bodies and black communities. The day you were born, about nine hundred other black babies were slaughtered. Black Americans only make up 13 percent of our population, but account for over 30 percent of our nation’s abortions. This is genocide.

Here’s what I mean: black abortion does not happen in a vacuum. Unless you truly believe that black mothers are more bloodthirsty, ignorant, or depraved than their white or Hispanic counterparts, there has to be something else going on behind these numbers.

no matter how well educated I am, I have a higher chance of dying in childbirth than any other ethnicity of woman in the United States. And your brother is more likely to be born premature or to die as an infant than any other ethnicity of baby.

The penalty for man-stealing and child-murder is the exact same in the Old Testament, but our patience for those in the former category as “a product of their times” differs radically from our blanket condemnation of those who endorse the latter in spite of the modern air they breathe. Why is that?

It’s okay that it’s complex. Because we have a Savior who sits with us in that complexity. And your identity in him supersedes that red, white, and blue flag every single time.

who have a long-term vision of meeting ultimate freedom at heaven’s gates and a short-term grit to pursue freedom during their time here on earth.

Donkeys and elephants be hanged. Because that’s the only allegiance that offers a roadmap out of the mire of the political mess we’ve made.

I look forward to reading you these stories someday and telling you about how, even during the seasons of snow, we are preparing for an eternal spring.

social justice is worldly and imprecise verbiage; racism is hatred, and the gospel fixes that; everyone sins, and there is no need to highlight the specific sins of specific people groups (unless it’s time to rattle off statistics about abortion or drug busts in black communities).

this life is not to bring about racial reconciliation in the church. In fact, our primary goal isn’t even to bring about justice here on earth. The ultimate justice has been dealt to Christ on the cross, accomplishing our reconciling in him.

As you grow up, you will learn that your Christian brethren have a tendency to either use “the gospel” (the phrase, not the substance) as a catch-all for every good work Christians should be doing or as a silencer for anything too difficult to think about.

He gave a specific, authoritative command to make disciples—enter into meaningful relationships where the goal is to teach and admonish with the Word of God, teaching all that he has commanded them.

It lurks everywhere. We are people who are only comfortable with anecdotal intimacy: you can only be vulnerable with me if you can express whatever problem you’re handling with a solution. We want neat and tidy stories, like Aesop’s Fables.

With racism (or prejudice), though, we’re hesitant about using culturally specific language, because progressives use it. Cultural code is only fine if it comes from the right camp. Instead of reframing an important conversation that should be grounded in the gospel, we let culture define the terms. We’re children hiding under a blanket we’ve thrown over our heads.

“You’re there to worship. The church isn’t about making you comfortable.” Amen. Nor is it about the comfort of our white brethren. If we’re passing around big boy pants, everybody should get a pair.

One of the first guys I ever liked told me he’d “always wanted to know what it would be like to kiss a black girl,” as though the experience were one to be crossed off a bucket list.