How can a decision made with love land in "harm"?
This essay first appeared in HuffPost. Here is how it opens.
Recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine, entitled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” In the essay, she says that she sent her daughter to a struggling school on principle, and that now, years later, she believes her girl “got cheated.”
The internet did what it does, rushing to decide whether she was a hero or a cautionary tale. But that conversation needs a harder truth, the one Black mothers have carried for generations: A decision can come from love and still land as harm. Both of those things can be true at the same time. My family has lived both sides of it.
When you are raising a Black child in America, you are presented with two doors and told to choose. Behind one is the neighborhood school, full of community and belonging and, too often, too few resources. Behind the other are the resources, paid for in a different currency: sacrificing belonging for microaggressions, in learning far too young that you are always being watched.
That is the beginning. The full essay, the whole of my mother's story and mine, lives on HuffPost.
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