Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy: Introduction

I was the black kid at the predominantly white private school—St. Mark’s School of Texas—who stuck out like a sore thumb.

Consider this book my attempt to be one of the adults who broaches those difficult conversations about race.

It wasn’t that overt...racism.

It was more subtle.

I had been fed the same stereotypical stuff about black people as the white kids around me, and I hadn’t been immune.

I’m not sure if we can cure racism completely, but I believe that just as scientists rushed to find a vaccine for COVID-19, we should be equally steadfast in finding a cure for the virus of racism and oppression.

I want to be an agent of change, want to help cure the systemic injustices that have led to the tragic deaths of too many of my black brothers and sisters; from prisons popping up around the country like fast-food chains; to inequalities in health care and education; to the often unseen racism behind who gets to live where; to the ingrained ignorance of Americans who can’t see beyond skin color.

I want to be an agent of change, want to help cure the systemic injustices that have led to the tragic deaths of too many of my black brothers and sisters; from prisons popping up around the country like fast-food chains; to inequalities in health care and education; to the often unseen racism behind who gets to live where; to the ingrained ignorance of Americans who can’t see beyond skin color.

If things go the way I hope they do, you will leave this book with more confidence in yourself and how to treat people who don’t look like you. You will have more empathy and grant people more grace. And if you have more empathy and are more gracious, then you’ll be less judgmental.

But if you peered inside their minds, you’d see that second-floor racists believe, with their whole hearts, very negative ideas—what folks call biases, or as they said back in the day, stereotypes—about people from other racial groups or ethnicities.

We’re going to talk about privilege. And complicity.

Think about it—I endured years and years of grueling football practices, many of them under a scorching Texas sun, before I made it to the NFL.

Hughes published these words in 1936, a time when Jim Crow laws, formal and informal, still ravaged the country and he had strong reason to criticize America for not fulfilling its promise to all of its citizens.

...people were still resistant to forging a version of America that made good on its founding principles.

If you’re reading these words, I’m going to venture that you might be ready to see the America that Langston Hughes challenged us all to will into existence.