White Mother/Black Sons

I am the white Jewish mother of Black sons. My older child was called “the N word” for the first time in Fire Island, New York, when he was three years old.

The younger one was called “the N word” for the first time in Massachusetts when he was six.

By the age of eighteen, he'd been interrogated by police in New York City and in many other places for walking, running, riding a bike, once on the road to Providence, Rhode Island, with his father, who quickly instructed him to put his hands on the dashboard in plain sight, as he'd instructed him and his older brother not to run on the street, especially at night, not even on our block, trying to catch a bus. He had been disciplined by white teachers for pointing to racism in classic white literature that would later be accepted by literary scholars. Now the cofounder and executive director of a nonprofit serving Black and Latinx youth, like most of his staff and youth members, he has been stopped and frisked many times.

My older son, an actor in Hollywood, is never called for auditions of characters assumed to be white. He is Black. A brown-skinned man like his brother and their father, the shade of their brownness irrelevant.

In 1995, home for a visit from college, my younger son and I are talking about race and his classes in African American studies. “I am Black,” he tells me. “I have a Jewish mother, but the term biracial is meaningless to me,” and, evoking the history of racial so-called “mixedness” going back to slavery with its long history of rape by white slaveholders of enslaved Black women, “I reject the identity of the tragic mulatto.” He continues to explain his beliefs, and when I say, “I understand,” he tells me gently, “I don't think you do, Mom. You can't understand this completely because you're white.”

I remember being stunned—by his vehemence and by the idea. Like most mothers, I have strongly identified with my children. Like other writers of my generation, I