COMMENTARY: Pondering the Futures of My Sons

c. 2003 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.) (UNDATED) My twin sons, Kevin and Jonathan, are […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) My twin sons, Kevin and Jonathan, are the smartest, handsomest little boys in the world. Every parent feels this way, of course, but in this case, it’s really true.


In addition to being brilliant and beautiful, they are also _ at six months and nearly 20 pounds apiece _ large. While this may change, I suspect “linebacker” is a term with which each of them will become familiar in due course.

Last, but certainly not least, they are also members of that endangered species known as the African-American male. All of which begs the question: What does the future hold for two large, handsome, intelligent African-American boys?

I ask this question in light of several facts. First, as I have written before, Kevin and Jonathan spent the first six weeks of their lives in the border baby unit of a Newark, N.J. hospital. Like the dozen or so roommates they had at the hospital, my boys were wards of the state, having been born to an unwed mother who was ill-equipped to rear them.

Yet, though my wife, our daughters and I have given the boys our home and our love, and desire to give them our name, I worry this may provide only a partial hedge against the inevitable questions about their “real” family and their “real” identity. This concern is exacerbated by the knowledge they will doubtless grow up knowing others similar to them, but for whom an adoptive family was never available. Indeed, my prison congregation is replete with such testimonies, which is partly why my family and I pursued adoption in the first place.

However, even beyond such issues as identity confusion and survivor’s guilt _ the “why-me-and-not-you?” burden of the luckily adopted _ there remains a second, concomitant concern. As writer John Edgar Wideman explains it in the current (November) issue of Essence magazine, this problem revolves around “our culture’s deeply conflicted attitude toward black boys, its habit of reaching out with one hand to play, to embrace and to celebrate, while the other hand’s a hidden fist, cocked and loaded to strike.”

What Wideman describes is a situation in which African-American males are never fully accepted on their own terms. “When the word boy (italics) is modified by the adjective black (italics),” he writes, “boy doesn’t necessarily suggest youth and promise. … Black boys are forced to remain boys or grow up too soon or never get a chance to grow up. They experience arrested development and/or entrapment. They’re cheated out of the sheltered, precious space of play, of making forgivable mistakes, of dreaming. For them boyhood becomes a dead end, their lives literally terminated by violent death or cut short abruptly and brutally by incarceration (in a ghetto, prison or no-win drug economy of addiction and dealing) by poverty, disease, ignorance, joblessness, idleness, media stereotyping, despair, (and) self-destructive aggression.”

Surely, the reader will say, Wideman is painting with brush strokes that are too broad. Such certainly cannot be the case with all black males.


And the reader will be correct _ all black males do not feel trapped all the time. The problem, however, is in the unpredictability with which the traps are sprung. The nation’s history of racial oppression, stereotyping in the mass media, and the black community’s own self-destructive behavior patterns have created a situation in which life as a black male often seems fraught with traps that appear spring-loaded. You never know where the traps are, who will be hurt, or the devastating effects that will be the result.

Thus is Wideman, a Rhodes Scholar, college professor and award-winning author, burdened with the survivor’s guilt associated with having both a brother and a son in prison for homicide.

Thus, too, do I worry about investing in my sons the tools necessary to navigate the racial seas of American life. There is simply no margin for error.

DEA END ATCHISON

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