Blog Archives

I want to start with acknowledging that Identity development involves many factors, adoption, foster care, multiracial identity, class, disability, and more. This piece and most of my pieces focus specifically on navigating race, recognizing there may be additional layers to your family’s experience. It’s important to recognize the lens in which we navigate information.

As a parent raising Black or Brown children while you yourself are not Black or Brown, you’re navigating something that requires more than love although love is essential. What also matters is understanding this truth: the USA was designed to ensure Black and Brown people live with fear that limits their potential. When you are Black or Brown, this reality is evident from day one. The difference lies in how we, as a community approach it.

Healthy Black communities understand that constant messages suggesting inferiority are not coming from within us, and they are not relevant to our story. We teach and live empowerment, not fear. We are not afraid of being Black. Being Black is not worrisome or scary. Which I’m sure seems like a “no-brainer”, however in reality, what is worrisome is how cultural practices of white supremacy reacts to and treats Black people. Healthy Black people do not center white people’s fear.

This is the critical distinction you must grasp: Fear of the Black experience is taught through ignorance and isolation, really just knowing the Black community only through rumors, TV, music, and/or distant perspectives. If you’ve been conditioned to fear what your child is or may become, how do you raise them to be unafraid of themselves? The deep truth is you cannot teach your child to be unafraid of themselves if you haven’t examined your own relationship with Blackness.

When you have a child developing an identity the world will work to demonize, your understanding of how Black people navigate and succeed in a discriminatory world directly shapes what and how you teach them.

Ways in which Fear shows up unconsciously could look like and is not limited to:

• Choosing hairstyles that are “easier to manage” which turn out to be less “ethnic”

• Skipping skincare steps to avoid attention, even though your child’s skin needs shea butter

• Asking your “talkative” toddler or “highly energetic” middle-schooler to quiet down, to be less noticeable, to fit standards designed to make them smaller

Black and Brown children are labeled “loud” or “overly energetic” instead of engaged and excited. Your job is to know the difference and protect your child’s full expression, not police it. Policing expression that looks new to you can be a total shut down of what they are naturally expressing. Proceed with curiosity and learn who they are, without any constraint.

Your babysitter, your child’s school, even your own parents may not realize they’re damaging your child’s self-esteem by treating what is normal as something needing correction. Fear can sometimes come in at this point as protection, be careful in the reason why.

The difficulty of this work is not a reason to shy away. We have all been socialized to believe people are better or worse based on skin color. You must locate where your internalized bias lies dormant, bring it into light, and deconstruct it.

Your child needs you to acknowledge Black excellence without framing it as “success despite discrimination” as if the benchmark is proving something to white supremacy. 2. Recognize Black struggle as the ability to rise above systemic harm, not as evidence of deficiency- this can be demonstrated in your narrative. 3. Teach them what is possible, not what is safe according to white comfort. 4.Discern truly safe spaces and people, not based on assimilation, but on who affirms your child’s full humanity.

You cannot shield your child from a world that will judge them by their skin. That is painful reality. But you do not have to accept the limits that world imposes. What you must do is ensure you are not unconsciously reinforcing those limits.

Here are three ways to get started:

1. Examine what you absorbed What did you learn about Black people growing up? Where did you learn it? What narratives about Black hair, Black speech, Black expressiveness do you carry unquestioned?

2. Build authentic relationships in Black community If you’re raising your child isolated from Black people and culture, you’re setting them up for harm. This isn’t about Tokenizing, it’s about your child needing mirrors and your needing people who can see your blind spots. Find Black-centered spaces: bookstores, cultural events, parenting groups, churches. Show up consistently, not as a spectator, get involved in a way you and your child are joining a community, and let them shine, while you support.

3. Learn from Black parents Read books by Black authors on Black child development (not white authors writing about Black children). Understand how Black parents teach empowerment in the face of systemic harm. This isn’t about copy and paste. This is perspective. This is a check in on your lens, this is a temperature check, and an opportunity to grow.

Prepare your child to navigate harm without internalizing it. They will encounter people and systems that don’t recognize their humanity. Your job is to make sure they know deeply, without question, that the problem is not them.

By age two, your child will notice race. By age four, they’ll ask why their skin is different from yours. By age 6, they’ll encounter their first racist comment. By age twelve, they’ll be navigating how the world sees them versus who they know themselves to be. At every stage, they need you awake and honest.

This work is ongoing. It requires you to keep examining where you might unconsciously teach your child to shrink. But this is the work that love requires when raising a Black or Brown child in a world not designed for their thriving.

So ask yourself: What is one belief about Black people you absorbed without questioning?

Start there.

What does Black History Month mean to you?

If you said “the shortest month,” we need to talk. If you said, “a celebration to show us about Black people,” we need to talk. Because both of those answers accept lies as truth. In 2026, as we watch the systematic dismantling of truth in education, book bans, attacks on teaching Black history, the weaponization of the word “woke” against truth-telling and collective awareness, it matters more than ever that we get this right.

The month is, of course, a celebration, but it was first a week of encouragement to celebrate Black achievement in a time when Black achievement was not widely accepted. It’s crucial that we know the truth of this month with accuracy, not with watered-down half-truths born from the unfortunate narrative that Black history is not American history.

The story begins in Chicago during the summer of 1915. Carter G. Woodson, an alumnus of the University of Chicago, traveled from Washington, D.C. to participate in a national celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation. Thousands of African Americans traveled from across the country to see exhibits highlighting the progress their people had made since the destruction of slavery. Awarded a doctorate from Harvard three years earlier, Woodson joined with a Black history display. Despite being held at the Coliseum, an overflow crowd of six to twelve thousand waited outside for their turn to view the exhibits.

Recognizing having earned his PhD from Harvard, Woodson understood what was at stake: a community’s relationship to its own excellence. Inspired by the celebration, he decided to form an organization to promote the scientific study of Black life and history. On September 9th, Woodson met at the Wabash YMCA with A. L. Jackson and three others and formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).

He established The Journal of Negro History in 1916, hoping others would popularize the findings. As early as 1920, Woodson urged Black civic organizations to promote the achievements researchers were uncovering. He urged his Omega Psi Phi fraternity brothers to take up the work. In 1924, they created Negro History and Literature Week, renamed Negro Achievement Week. But Woodson desired greater impact. As he told Hampton Institute students, “We are going back to that beautiful history and it is going to inspire us to greater achievements.”

Black History week was for the growth and encouragement of a community to resist settling into mediocrity. It was internal cultural work, Black people creating the conditions for our own remembering, our own inspiration, our own refusal to accept less than our full humanity. In 1925, Woodson decided the Association had to shoulder the responsibility of both creating and popularizing knowledge about the Black past. He sent out a press release announcing Negro History Week in February 1926.

Woodson chose February for reasons of tradition and strategy. He selected it to encompass the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the 12th and the 14th respectively. Since Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the Black community had been celebrating the fallen President’s birthday. The narrative that Black people were given the shortest month of the year due to disrespect is simply untrue. This myth diminishes the intentional, strategic brilliance of Woodson’s choice. It replaces Black agency with Black victimhood. It erases the fact that Black people chose February, claimed it, built something powerful within it. Woodson didn’t passively accept what he was given, he strategically chose. This distinction between passive receipt and active creation is a critical difference in narrative of Black identity in the United States. I will add that it was 50 years later that this week was granted the entire month of February by President Ford.

In 2026, when accurate Black history is being banned from classrooms, when DEI initiatives are being rolled back, when the structures that allowed truth-telling are being systematically dismantled, knowing the real story of Black History Month is an act of resistance. It’s proof that we have always had to create the conditions for our own remembering. It’s proof that erasure has always been the project, and reclamation has always been our response.

When we accept watered-down stories like February was an insult rather than a strategic choice, that this month is about what was given to us rather than what we created for ourselves, as if we accept a diminished version of ourselves. That would indicate that we settled into the very mediocrity Woodson fought against.

Black History Month was not designed for white learning. It was internal cultural work that others are invited to witness but not center themselves in. It was about a community saying: we will not let our children grow up believing we have no history of brilliance, no tradition of excellence, no legacy worth celebrating. We will research it, document it, teach it, and celebrate it ourselves. As parents who are not Black, this is something to protect, to champion, to insist on.

With this celebration, make sure it is a celebration true to its nature, its story, its legacy. Share that Carter G. Woodson didn’t wait for permission. Share that Black communities organized themselves to reclaim and celebrate their own history when it was being systematically erased. Share that February was claimed with intention, not assigned as an afterthought. Share that this month was created to inspire us to resist mediocrity and reach for the pursuit of excellence is our birthright. It is a testament to the refusal to be forgotten, the insistence on being known truthfully, and the understanding that a people who know their history refuse to settle for anything less than full potential.

That being said, our communities have a hidden code of norms that are not safe for everyone. They are norms that subtly tell some children they must wait their turn to be heard or seen, with little encouragement to dream as big as they can. The words may say one thing, but opportunity, access, and resources say something very different.

We are in a time when nothing can be taken for granted and everything good, fair, and just must be protected. We have to reach for the most ideal version of equity. This is the time to take all doubt of possibility out of your mind and insist on it, unequivocally.

This moment is slightly different from the history of marches, judicial decisions, and constitutional amendments, because this is not just about the “exceptions to the rule”, the others: people of the global majority, women, disabled folks, or the queer community. This includes people who were thought to be protected. White, educated men who are not billionaires do not get a pass. They cannot pass go. Their $200 stolen. The lie is exposed.

It is crucial to examine the narratives we have practiced and passed down. Does your narrative, your songs, your books, your baby classes actively EXPRESS inclusion? Does the park where you take the dog reflect a diverse population? Does your yoga class acknowledge and honor the origins of the practice? Are we assuming these things are by choice, or have we recognized a design of exclusion? If the answer is no, do you know why?

When we are playing with and teaching our youngest people, they are learning by example faster than AI is evolving. Language of comparison, of class, of either/or thinking is problematic in a community of inclusion. Of course, as parents, it starts with us. We have to practice this in ways that don’t insist on perfectionism, but in ways that allow for learning and practiced humility. Here are a few examples you can try:

• Instead of “We don’t do that in our family,” try “Some families do it this way, some do it that way, and both are beautiful.”

• Instead of “They’re different from us,” try “They do things differently than we do, what can we learn from them? What can we share in learning?”

• Instead of “You’re so lucky to have what you have,” try “We’re grateful for what we have, and everyone deserves to have their needs met.”

• Instead of “Those people over there,” try using names, or “our neighbors,” or “people in our community.”

• Instead of “That’s weird or odd,” try “That’s new to me, tell me more about it.”

I believe compassion is easy for little ones. Adults tend to operate from some sort of fear. There is plenty to be afraid of, especially now, but fear will never develop into functional or positive clarity.

Children respond to joy in ways that are expansive. Children have a magic they are born with. Their minds are full of stories based only in imagination and possibility. If our stories about our neighbors, about our place in society, remove man-made barriers like race and fill their hearts with diverse language and knowledge of global humanity, then “different” only means options of possibility. Having a healthy sense of cultural appreciation, with a healthy lack of ownership, just shared joy is the world of a child’s connection.

Reject the narrative of division and insist, everywhere you are, that division is not tolerated, it is not celebrated and most importantly not ignored as a norm in this new world and your babies will follow!