Dear Langston and Logan,
In my new book, I make arguments that hurt your chance to benefit from affirmative action. When you are older, you’ll learn what that is, or what it used to be. I have great confidence in you and believe you will amaze yourselves and better your country and your world. But other children will not have the opportunities you have, and I want them, too, to be successful and to contribute to society.
As I write this you are 6—and three-quarters, you would remind me. Your curiosity is boundless. Your willingness to work at things is growing. Your dad and I push you. But one day, all too soon, you will have to choose your own paths.
You will have to decide whether you will enter the fray that is elite higher education. You cannot depend on your name, or your color, or your parents’ connections. You must depend on yourselves and the lifelong project of cultivating what is unique and precious about you.
While you are pursuing your passions, recognize that some things are required of you that you won’t enjoy, and just deal with it. Work and work and work some more until you get it. That is what African-American strivers have always done.
Grandpa did. I hope you will remember him, and not only as the old man we visited at the nursing home. Before he was in a wheelchair, before his voice had diminished to a whisper and words eluded him, he strode proudly in the world. At Fisk University, where he and his parents went, he would get up at 4 or 5 in the morning to study. He was expelled for having a party in his dorm room, but he recovered from that mistake and went on to graduate first in his class at Meharry Medical College. Grandpa learned the habits of success from his mother, my Grandma Grace, a school principal who raised both of her sons to be valedictorians.
Grandpa’s habits became my habits. And you have watched your father, too, toil for hours, researching and writing papers for his master’s degree. He already had two degrees, from college and law school. In middle age, even with a full-time job, he decided to go back to school, because he wanted to do more in life, and he wanted to explore a subject that interested him. That is your legacy. Embrace it and know that you are capable of more than you ever thought possible.
But for African-Americans, possibility is matched by peril. If the police are called to a party where kids of all colors smoke marijuana or drink alcohol, you may be the only one who gets arrested and hauled off to jail. That is an old story. Your great-great-grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin, was ejected violently from a train in Alabama in the 1890s because he sat where he wanted to. It didn’t matter that he was a lawyer dressed like the patrician that he was. In the 1950s an Alabama state trooper knocked my father unconscious with a police stick, all because Grandpa had exited his fancy convertible and spoke too confidently, in the trooper’s estimation, after a stop for speeding. A policeman stopped me for driving too fast on a dark road in Georgia. It was 1986. I was skinny then and clearly no threat, but the officer made me get out of the car and stand spread-eagle against it while he frisked me.
Neither affirmative action nor I can protect you from predatory policing, gun violence, or the fact that society will never love you the way I do. All I can do is prepare you and pray. One day you will cease being adorable in the eyes of strangers. Even before your first facial hairs emerge, you will notice that some people are afraid of you. They may lack the empathy that you already possess. You notice a homeless man on the street and ask about his life, how he got there, how he eats. You told your father the other day that you wanted to give your money to people who don’t have very much. Giving and caring about others is also your legacy.
Grandma Harriette’s mother and father, Hattie and John Francis Clark, raised five children in Charleston, W.Va. Four of them became doctors and the fifth a lawyer. Great-Grandpa Clark earned degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard and became a high-school principal, the leading educator of Negro children in Charleston. Hattie became a schoolteacher at 15 and bought her first piece of land at 17. Your great-grandparents were always investing and building. They built a post office and leased it to the government. They started a family corporation that is now run by a third generation of descendants.
In the Depression, the Clark home was filled to bursting with relatives and friends who had lost everything. Hattie Clark would take them in. One family lived on the back porch. Mommy and Daddy were following Hattie’s example when we invited your cousin to live with us and sponsored her through college. That is another tradition you must continue: Take care of your family. Lift up the ones who stumble. They will lift you when you fall.
Find your allies, whatever color they may be, and don’t worry about those who are difficult to connect with. Try to understand how they see the world, but then move on. A maître d’ once asked me whether you would become rappers or ball players. “Aiming kind of high, aren’t we?” he said when I suggested doctor or lawyer instead. At first I was angry. Then I realized that he may have been struggling to take care of his own children on what he earned working in that restaurant. You enjoy advantages his children do not.
That is why I do not believe that you need or deserve affirmative action. It is not enough that each of you is an African-American male, that you will be profiled, that some people see you as an endangered species, that you may offer a “black” perspective, whatever that is, in the classroom. There are other black children who have a lot less than you do who need the fair shot at life your parents are providing you. If you apply to college and are allowed to benefit merely from the fact that you are black, then some people will continue to resent you, and that will make it harder for the country to adopt policies that help poor children of all colors.
I would trade the benefit to you of affirmative action for a country that does not fear and demonize people who look like you. America is divided, but your generation, the first in American history in which no one group is a majority, will do better. Prove wrong others’ assumptions about you, find your multiracial army, and fight for the country you deserve.