Am I Doing the Right Thing?

For as long as I can remember, as black women with sons we’ve handed our boys a script we thought would save them: Work hard. Get that degree. Climb the ladder. Move into the good neighborhoods, get into the right schools, and give them the world. We raised them to believe that if they just worked twice as hard, if they fit in, if they played by the rules, success would somehow act as armor. We trusted the script.

Lately, though? My hands are shaking just typing this, because that script is tearing right down the middle, and I don't know how to protect my baby anymore.

The news loves to broadcast the danger in our own backyards, but nobody is talking about the real nightmare—the quiet, suffocating terror happening in the exact spaces we fought so hard to reach. More and more of us are finally making it into those exclusive, predominantly white social circles, elite sports leagues, and weekend getaways, only to wake up to a horrifying reality: crossing over into privilege doesn't mean our sons are protected. Not at all!

Look at what happened to 18-year-old Nolan Wells down in Mississippi. My God, it keeps me up at night. He was an athlete, a brilliant boy with his entire life ahead of him, just out on a Fourth of July boat trip with his peers. The exact kind of normal, all-American scene I dream of for my child. And days later? He was gone. Just gone.

Then came the playbook we all know by heart, the one that makes me sick to my stomach: official reports locked down tight, friend groups closing ranks, and a vicious, online lynch-mob dragging a grieving mother through the dirt just because she dared to ask what happened to her child. When tragedy strikes our boys in these cross-racial spaces, the system doesn't look for truth. It doesn't look for justice. It's very first instinct is to cover it up, protect their own, and make our children disappear.

Families like the Wells are forced to fight a war on two fronts—drowning in an unimaginable, chest-crushing grief, while simultaneously having to defend themselves against people who look at our sons as disposable and our tears as an inconvenience.

I am so tired, and honestly? I am so, so scared. I’ll be damned if that ever happens to mine. You know how it is—raising a Black boy in a world that somehow looks at him like a threat even when he’s just trying to breathe. It’s breaking us. My chest is tight from the very second he walks out that front door. I want him to experience the world and live fearlessly, but I carry this heavy, sickening dread in my gut every single day that trusting the wrong group of kids or stepping into the wrong room could end his life. Then when you see the police, the schools, and the authorities stonewall a family that's already shattered? It just takes my breath away. It’s that terrifying reminder that the system was never built to protect our sons. To top it all off, they expect us to mourn in silence. While strangers on the internet and hostile communities tear families apart and try to rewrite the narrative, we're just supposed to take it.

I don't want to lock him in a bubble, My God, I don't. He deserves to breathe fresh air. He deserves to fly. But how on earth do I let him out into a world that might chew him up? We have to move differently now. We have to look way deeper than zip codes. I’ve had to learn that a fancy neighborhood or a country club membership means absolutely nothing. True safety isn't about the price tag on a house; it’s about watching how a community actually treats our children when things go wrong, long before a crisis ever hits.

We also have to keep it real with our boys. I want him to take up space and soar, but I can't afford to let him be naive anymore. I have to be brutally honest with him about the way things are, show him the dangerous blind spots out there, and teach him how to spot the red flags before it's too late.

Most importantly, we have to lean hard on our village. We cannot trust mainstream institutions to care for our boys the way we do. We have to lean on each other—our real friends, our cultural networks, our safe spaces—where we can finally let our guard down, catch our breath, and share this crushing weight with sisters who actually understand the exact fear in our eyes.

Our boys deserve to just be boys. Until the rest of the world finally wakes up and sees their humanity, our best armor is keeping our eyes wide open, keeping them close, and sticking together.

My son deserves to just be a boy. He deserves to travel, to play, to laugh, and to live without constantly looking over his shoulder for a danger he didn't ask for. Until the rest of the world finally wakes up and sees their humanity, our best armor is keeping our eyes wide open, keeping them close, and sticking together.