A Black Mother’s Love and Fear for Her Children in a White World - The New York Times

BREATHE
A Letter to My Sons
By Imani Perry

How do you instill enough self-love in your children that it will buoy them when racial hatred threatens to pull them under? This is the challenge for parents of black children, and the aim of “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons,” by Imani Perry.

A professor of African-American studies at Princeton, Perry is a prolific writer whose work, including her recent award-winning biography of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, contributes to a fuller understanding of black history and culture. But in “Breathe,” the scholar forsakes the safe harbor of academic objectivity for the wilds of personal vulnerability. Her exhale feels overdue, and deep.

This is a mother who has made it by most standards, yet she cannot guarantee the safety of her offspring because of the color of their skin. She stands guard at a crossroads where past is present, the political is personal and the abstract or purely hypothetical is all too real. Like any parent, she wants her children, two boys, to be able to create a decent and happy life for themselves. Yet the “terrifying specter” of the white imagination means they are often not seen as individuals but instead are judged for being black — “subject to the larger white world’s constant evaluation as to whether or not you are worthy.” (She compiles a running list of criticisms and put-downs to which her kids are subjected: “Too mobile, too slow, too fast, inattentive. Why are you still in the bathroom? It takes you too long to pee. It takes you too long to remember this algorithm, this table. You hold the pencil too tight, you do not hold it tightly enough.”) We hear echoes of Hansberry’s fictional family in “A Raisin in the Sun” debating the merits of moving to a white community versus allowing those would-be white neighbors to buy them off in exchange for staying put. Perry chose the former for her sons, along with its consequences. “You live in some worlds that are more white than black,” she tells them. “And so, you learn, early on, that the aversion to blackness can turn perfectly lovely people grotesque.”

One presumes she is referring not only to strangers but to those in the village it is said to take to raise a child — those who are supposed to care about her children in the manner due all children, and yet do not act. From them she regularly hears, “It must be terrifying to raise a black boy in America,” and her frustration with these newly, barely, woke folk is palpable: “Without hesitation, they speculate as if it is a statement of fact. I look into their wide eyes. I see them hungry for my suffering, or crude with sympathy or grateful they are not in such a circumstance.” It is not that she doesn’t want them to care about black suffering. Her point is, Would you stop pleading innocence and do something?

But educating those folks is not Perry’s primary aim; instead, “Breathe” centers on black endurance. Her book offers her children an elixir of history, ancestry and compassion, which, together, become instruction. She shares a childhood memory of the grotesque as prologue: a brilliant teacher who repeatedly singled her out for mockery and degradation while white classmates looked on. “They were disciplined into passive acceptance, into reaping the rewards, while I was humiliated over and over again. … Bewildered at the idea that they might have something asked of them to disrupt the hideous truth. This is what you are surrounded by. Silent witnesses.”

She reckons with how to stay in control when the news routinely offers a one-two punch: Black children are harmed and the wrongdoers go free. “Feeling deep love and complete helplessness to protect the beloveds is a fact of black life.” In one sobering passage, she imagines what could have happened to her teenage sons when a tripped alarm summoned the police to their home one night. What if an officer had mistaken one of her boys for an intruder? She admits readers may find this “melodramatic.” But whether a son would have been gunned down in his own home is beside the point; the stress of worrying accumulates and becomes its own specter: “Hypervigilant panic is our misfortune.”

Yet life is the gift Perry offers her sons, not fear or helplessness. “I cannot clip your wings. … No, I want your wingspan wide.” “Breathe” is a testament to her long game, a refusal to let unwarranted and unpunished death frighten her sons from truly living. She steers them away from the belief that an admirable life depends on achieving professional and economic status: “The greatest legacy you come from, to my mind, is of the people who found meaning beyond the doors of universities or the luster of careers. Who were themselves, even in the tiniest of ways, when there was hardly any place to be.” Perry heeds the words of a Zen priest who speaks of “freeing oneself of the white mind, of its overwhelming method of seeing and interpreting, as a means of getting closer to truth.” “Breathe” models the practice.

Perry never reveals specific harms that her sons have endured, which is the book’s transcending quality; it is not about them. Instead, she insists that all black children be treated with dignity and kindness. Here her voice takes on an oracular quality: “Like the phoenix, in you the ancestors come again, rise from the curling red and gray ashes underneath lynching trees. … That is what black reincarnation is. The debt is still owed. We keep making generations to collect our inheritance.”

It is when we know these ancestors, their history and their progress, Perry suggests, and when we believe in the right to a life of dignity despite what others may think, that our breath itself is power. “Breathe” is a parent’s unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma and love, for her children’s right simply to be possible.

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