Racism, or Just Human Behavior? Tieri’s Playground Lesson on Prejudice and Possibility

Tieri,

I did not come to fatherhood late.

I came to it at an advanced age.

They are not the same thing.

“Late” assumes a clock I was supposed to beat.

But my times are in His hands,
and God is never late.

There is no delay in Him,
only an appointed time.

When my time came,
I was not deprived.

You are the proof.

It was the best time for me to become your father.

Long before you arrived,
I had been a father to many children.

As I often say,
I was a father of all
before I became a father of one.

And becoming your father at an advanced age
meant bringing to you
the experience and wisdom
the years had given me.

Few weeks ago, I took you to play by the water in New York,
a shallow pond built to mimic a beach.

A little girl was not nice to you.

She even picked on you.

She was white,
and older than you,
six, maybe seven,
to your four.

She said you splashed her.

When you offered to share,
when you reached for her plastic shovel to pack sand,
she snatched it back.

I saw it land in your eyes.

That small, first injustice a child feels
before he has a word for it.

So I called you aside,
the way a coach calls a boy off the field.

I told you that you were not the reason for her unfriendliness.

I told you people have bad days,
and a bad day is not the whole of a person.

I told you to go back into the water and play.

You did.

She kept at it.

So I went to her mother,
quietly, without accusation
and told her what I had seen.

The mother called her over.

She spoke to her.

The girl came back softer.

For a while.

Then she returned to her posture.

And I told you, simply:

Play as if she is not there.

You did.

Then other children came,
and you had a great day.

Now, my son,
let me tell you what I did not say to you that afternoon.

She was older than you.

She was bigger than you.

And she was white.

It crossed my mind,
I will not pretend it did not,

that some of her hardness
might have had something to do
with the colour of your skin.

You are a Black boy.

We live in America.

I am not naïve.

But it was a possibility,
not a certainty.

An older child was unkind to a younger one.

That much I saw with my own eyes.

The rest,
I could not prove.

And standing there in the sun,
I made a decision.

I would not hand you
a wound I could not prove.

I would not teach you
to enter the world already braced,
reading every snatched shovel
as a verdict.

Because hear me, Tieri.

Racism is real.

But it cannot determine who you become
without your consent.

Consent begins the moment
you surrender your God-given identity,
your divine will to be yourself,
and your limitless capacity
to make your difference in this world
to the boundaries
of another person’s prejudice.

Never give that consent.

I would rather raise
a free man
than a fearful one.

I would rather you meet the world open,
and answer its hardness when it is real,
than teach you to expect hardness
and so summon it
before it arrives.

That is not blindness.

It is freedom.

Hear me, my son,
for this is what your father
has given his life to.

I believe
we build a world fit for children
only when we build
people fit for children.

That is my mantra,
and I have not wavered from it.

But do not mistake me.

Building a world fit for you,
and building you fit for that world,
are not enemies.

They are the same work,
begun from two ends.

So I will keep asking
parents
to teach their children well.

And I will keep teaching you
to stand,
whether they do or not.

Both.

Always both.

So play, my son.

Share your shovel,
even when yours is snatched.

Go back into the water.

And when the other children come,
and they will come,

have your great day.

I came to fatherhood
at an advanced age,
at the appointed time.

And I am not finished yet.

— Dad