Dear White women who have children with Black men:
After years of listening, observing, counseling, and hearing Black and mixed-race people speak about their lives, I have discovered that many of you are injuring your children on the soul level. You are wounding them in ways that may not be obvious to you, because the harm is often done implicitly. It begins in your heart when contempt starts to form for the father, his family, or your child when they exhibit the things you hate about their dad. No matter how you dress it up, the disdain doesn’t disappear. It is articulated in the way you care for your children, in the way you love them, during discipline, and in the small exchanges you think don’t matter.
They matter.
Racism is fostered when a Black woman tells your child something and you immediately tell the child the opposite. It is instilled when the child’s father sets a boundary and you overturn it, or when his mother, sisters, or aunts expect the child to behave with respect and you step in to “protect” the child from them. When you allow your child to behave in ways that would not be tolerated from the Black children around them, and when you treat correction from Black people as harsh, aggressive, or inappropriate while treating your own authority as reasonable and loving, this is racism at work.
You may think you are protecting your child, but what you are often teaching them is that whiteness holds the ultimate authority. You are teaching them that a white woman can dismiss a Black woman, undermine a Black man, disrespect his family, and position herself as superior. You are teaching them that Black people can be contradicted, dishonored, and treated as though their words carry no weight. These things enter the child’s psyche and eat away at their sense of self.
There is a belief among some white women that because they love, marry, sleep with, or have children with a Black man, they are not racist. There is also a belief that because the child is partly white, the child is somehow protected from Blackness, or does not have to understand what it means to move through the world as Black. But Blackness is more than a social construct. It lives deep in our souls. Blackness is symbolic of ancestral blood. It carries the scars and the triumphs of generations past, and it holds the symbolic significance of culture, place, and ancestral lands. When a child straddles the space between Black and white, their potential work is profound, but the potential for injury is so much greater than many understand.
Though your child may be light-skinned, have your features, and have access to whiteness through proximity to you, they will not always be granted the innocence, forgiveness, or freedom you have been granted. Even when they can pass, the blatant racism they witness may still strike their soul, because they see themselves and their people in those being harmed. They may become torn between self-preservation and self-destruction as they witness the damage while also attempting to protect themselves.
When you send a Black child into the world behaving like an entitled white person and call that freedom, you are injuring them on a psychic level. That you may move through the world this way is a separate matter.
Your child needs a sense of honor. They need dignity, discernment, self-respect, and respect for others. They need to understand that they are accountable for how they move through the world. And they need to know how to receive correction without believing that every boundary is an act of violence against them.
When you constantly excuse their behavior, override their father, or rescue them from the expectations of Black family members, you are not teaching them confidence. You are teaching them dishonor, disrespect, and entitlement. Further, you are teaching them that Black authority is illegitimate.
When you sleep with a Black man and despise his mother, you are not loving him. And it is not loving him when you hate his sisters, dismiss his daughters, disrespect his aunts, or treat Black women as aggressive, ignorant, dirty, unreasonable, or beneath you.
It is not loving him when you disrespect his sons, scorn his brothers, disregard his uncles, demonize his father, or treat the Black men as aggressive, dangerous, incompetent, or inferior to you.
Your child is watching. Your child is absorbing.
A daughter looks at the Black women in her family and sees parts of herself. She may see her face, her body, her voice, her gestures, her temperament, or the woman she may become. When you reject those women, you are not simply saying you dislike them. You are saying something about her.
A son watches how you treat Black women and learns from you, too. He may learn that Black women are to be used, dismissed, dishonored, or treated as though their feelings and authority do not matter. He watches the dynamic between you and his father and learns that a Black man can be lusted for while his authority is undermined and his family despised. These are the ways in which racism festers, reproduces, and becomes internalized.
Telling your child that they are beautiful is not enough.
You are not communicating your admiration of their beauty when you treat their hair as a problem, their skin as irrelevant or exotic, their body like property, or their Black family as inferior. You are teaching them not to trust themselves. They feel your disgust while they hear your words, and that causes incongruence. When you tell them to love themselves while showing contempt for the people in whom they recognize themselves, you are forcing them to split. When you call them beautiful and then groom them with aggression, humiliation, disgust, contradiction, and fear, you are teaching them that love is self-violent. Children internalize the ways in which they are handled, and when the one mishandling them is white, no matter the relationship, it becomes an act of racism.
When the white mother is positioned as clean, gentle, rational, and correct while the Black child and Black family are treated as dirty, unruly, harsh, dangerous, or excessive, the child absorbs that hierarchy. It becomes part of how they understand themselves in relation to the world.
When you repeatedly rescue them from Black people, they learn that not only is Blackness dangerous and whiteness safety, but an internal conflict develops. Because both Blackness and whiteness exist within them, this teaches them to locate danger and safety within their own being, and they become divided against themselves.
When you allow them to disrespect Black people, they learn that Black people are beneath them. But the wound goes deeper than this. They also learn that something inside them is beneath you, because they, too, are connected to Blackness. This is how self-hatred is planted. It does not always begin with someone calling the child a racial slur. Sometimes it begins with the mother rolling her eyes when the Black grandmother speaks. It begins with the father saying no and the mother quietly saying yes. It begins with the child learning that they do not have to listen to Black people because their white mother will intervene. These small acts of disrespect gather inside the child until they become a way of understanding themselves. Pretending race does not matter does not make your home safe. It brings society’s racial violence into the place where your child should be most protected.
Your Black and mixed-race daughters do not move through the world as you do. They encounter racial projections you will never face. When they attempt to speak about this and you go to the place of guilt and tears, dismiss them, defend yourself, defend whiteness, or insist that they are too sensitive, that they should be more positive, or that they are intolerant, they learn that you must be protected from their experience, and so they retreat.
In the best cases, they turn to therapy. They find one another. They form relationships with other Black, brown, and mixed-race people who understand what they have been unable to explain at home. Many carry depression, anxiety, shame, estrangement from their bodies, disordered eating, and damaged relationships. Some turn toward substances, compulsive sexual behavior, self-harm, or thoughts of suicide. Beneath all of this lies the question: how can a mother love her child when she hates their body, hair, and the people from whom they’ve come? She can’t, not fully, and this is how internalized oppression begins.
The child learns that a Black man can be lusted for while his authority is dishonored. They learn that Black women can be hated while their bodies, labor, care, and relationships are still used. They learn that racial contempt and intimate love exist as one. They internalize the contempt and name it love. That contradiction wounds the soul.
When you choose to have a Black child, you choose to enter into a relationship with Blackness. This requires more than telling the child they are beautiful or that all people are equal. It is social, cultural, psychological, ancestral, and spiritual work, and it requires you to examine how you speak to your child and how you speak to the people around them. Moreover, this requires you to honestly examine how you feel about your child and about Black people. The feeling goes far deeper than the words, because it seeps through every interaction. Raising these children well requires you to notice whom you contradict, whose authority you undermine, and why you believe your judgment should always prevail. And it requires you to ask whether you are truly protecting your child or protecting your own authority.
Loving a Black man does not absolve you of racism. Having a Black child does not make you safe. Your conscious intentions do not erase the impact of your behavior. Your children feel your dis-ease, and they are stuck trying to prove loyalty to you while amputating a part of their soul in order to remain loved.