Foreword

Introduction

1. You Are Mine

2. You Are God's

3. You Are Beautiful

Interlude:
I Didn't Know I Was Beautiful

4. You Are American

Interlude:
Ode to Langston

5. You Are the Church

6. You Are More Than Your Ethnicity

Interlude:
It's Okay to Be Offended

7. You Are a Brother

8. Be a Good Brother to the Sisters

9. Be an Advocate

Interlude:
The Time I Almost Unfollowed Someone on Twitter

10. Be a Bridge

Interlude:
How to Study and How to Talk

11. You Are a Different Story

Interlude:
In Search of Mentorship

12. You Are a New Tribe

Acknowledgments

Notes

Praise for Mother to Son

About the Author

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Foreword

Jackie Hill Perry

Black boys have it hard in this country. I know not because I’ve experienced it myself but because I’m married to one who has. My husband, a black boy once, now a man with the same skin, has opened my eyes to that reality. Being with him is how I’ve seen that the burdens brown boys speak about carrying are not exaggerations. One time, we were going through TSA before boarding a flight for home. My husband’s boarding pass was given a red stamp unlike mine. At security, my experience was ordinary. I went through the x-ray once. My husband went through as well, but upon handing his stamped boarding pass to the agent, he was told that he needed to be checked again. I asked one of the agents about the stamp and the additional security screening. “He was stamped because he looked suspicious,” the agent said.

I wondered what made him more suspicious than I would be. Or anyone else for that matter. Was it that he didn’t smile wide enough at the flight agent? Maybe it was because he made too much eye contact with her or maybe not enough? She might’ve thought him to be impersonal or maybe too personal for her liking. All of these were vain speculations though—a charitable practice in denial. We both knew that his skin alongside all that he was made him a potential threat to the safety of an entire airport. But even then, I knew it wasn’t just the deep brown tint of his body, a tone that God providentially intended for him to have. It was that he was brown and boy. It is one thing to be an African American in this country; it is another to be that and male. There is something about the two being embodied in one that sets Americans on fire.

Jasmine’s letters to her son, I think, are her way of turning her pen into a hydrant. Not only to put out the flames inside of individuals and communities. The heat coming from the unwillingness and perhaps inability to acknowledge that race and racism is a reality in our country. But her letters, a metaphor for water, are here to quench our thirst. To give us something that we all need: life. This life not springing out of nowhere but out of Someone. Jesus, that beautiful brown man that dignifies us all. Her words are anchored in a truth ...