DEAR BLACK PARENTS: PLEASE LOVE YOUR CHILDREN SO THEY WON’T GROW UP TO BE CLARENCE THOMAS
But mostly I want her to be in love with who she is. Not a suffocating, consuming, constricting, and narcissistic love where she’s the only meaningful entity in her universe. But a love where she’s able to acknowledge, accept, embrace, and find the beauty and the value in all the things that make her her. A love of herself and her skin and her nose and her lips and her hair and her people and her parents and her Blackness that exists without reservation or shame and permeates and inspires others around her to strive for their best selves.
Basically, I do not want her to be Clarence Thomas.
Because if she were to become Clarence Thomas — a person whose shame of and disgust with himself and his Blackness is so pervasive and palpable and, unfortunately, powerful that it can literally alter history — it would mean that I failed. That I was an abject and thorough disaster of a parent. That something I did or didn’t do turned this smiling, rolling, bouncing, and burping six-month old bundle of Blackness into a joyless and self-loathing schlemiel who grew to rue the day she was born Black.
http://verysmartbrothas.com/dear-black-parents-please-love-your-children-so-they-wont-grow-up-to-be-clarence-thomas/
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