A Letter to My Unborn Child

Today, you are potential. For the entirety of your non-existence, you have been potential. When my mother had me, you were a brief idea of hope in her mind. And when your grandmother had your mother, she knew that one day you would exist. On the day that you enter the corporeal world, I want you to know that the innate dream of perpetuity (potential) is what drives our every action.

On the day of your birth, people will continue to see your potential. You will be born to a father who is well known in his community, who makes enough money to feed you healthy foods, put a roof over your head to keep you warm and dry, and provide a safe environment for you. Your mother, the nurse, the lover, the singer, will want to stay home with you every single day, she and I will probably have to argue over who gets that privilege: to be that face that you see when you wake up, to be the arms that hold you when you cry, to be the hands that feed you when you are hungry. And you will have grandparents – six of them, to be exact – who will drive for miles to see you whenever they have the chance.

You will obviously be loved. You will get a good education. You will be told that you can be the president, or that you can be the best piano player in the world, or that you can be a CEO or an engineer or an astronaut. The whole world will be yours, and your potential will grow.

Your teachers will call you a good child. I’ll work one job and your mother will work one job. We’ll make time for you when we are needed. We will advocate for you. People will say we are good parents because we are involved, and because we can afford to be involved. Some might even call us helicopter parents. Although we will want you to seek your own potential without us hovering, we will still worry. On the day you get your driver’s license, we will ask you where you are going and when you will be back. We will resist the urge to use your “find my phone” app, but we will probably check it once or twice. We’ll hope that, one day, we won’t have to get a call from you when you are picked up by the police, but if we do, we will be happy that you’re safe and ashamed of your tomfoolery.

I can't promise you a lavish lifestyle. I can’t promise that we will be in the one percent. I can’t promise you too many luxuries that are above and beyond the immediate. But you will live a happy life, I promise you that. You will live out the potential that you have always been, and you will always have that potential.

You see, my child, you are lucky. Along with your potential has been the history of familial luck. You will be born with a grandfather who is willing to invest in your education, and who was able to give your father a small loan to complete his Master’s. You will be born with a police system that will, all things considered, never try to take a shot at you unless some statistical anomaly occurs. If everything continues the way that it does, you will probably be born under a presidential administration that favors people who look like you and act like you and talk like you because you will be a square peg in a square hole. Your culture will not experience cultural hegemony and you will have the tools and willingness to look up what that word means. You will even have the mobility to pay for ten years of instruction whose sole purpose is to explain what that word means.

I say this to you because this is the potential that you carry. There is nothing difficult about living an easy life. There is nothing hard about pulling your boots up when you are born with them secured to your feet. I could go on with adages that all add up to the same conclusion about an unexamined life, but what is important for you to understand is that you will have many things that others will not, and that others will have very little because of one thing: the color of their skin. Much like potential has been the backpack you have carried even before you were born, fear has been attached to the preconception of unborn people of color. Theirs's is fear of being born into a world that has effectively exorcised, undermined, and extorted their culture. It is through comparing your backpack to theirs that the word potential takes on a new meaning: privilege.

You must understand something about privilege: Your privilege can be shared, but it can never be a commodity. Much like an employer does not expect a reward for paying his workers, you should never expect a reward for providing your unearned privilege to those who were not born with it. You see, there is a dichotomy in our society regarding who deserves privilege. Although many are blind to the privilege they have, those same people are steadfast in their belief that privilege can only be earned. They will think this while they receive their father’s inheritance, who built that inheritance off of his father’s inheritance, who built that inheritance off of his father’s inheritance. It will be your job to be a disruption to those rules, and to help people – people who don’t look like you or like me – to be in positions that will allow them to disrupt those rules too. It will be your job understand your culture – because your culture will be your enemy and your friend, and it is best to keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your frienemies closest – and it will be evermore incumbent for you to learn the cultures of others.

You will more than likely be born in a city that has become famous for managerial racism, that has been rated as one of the worst places to live for African Americans; you will live in a place whose police officers have pointed their weapons at five unarmed Black youth in two separate incidences, and you will live in a place whose largest employer only employs a fraction of a percentage of people of color.

My child, you have a great amount of potential. You have the potential to use your unearned privilege for good. You have the potential to see through coded language, and to crack through the fine china in which the privileged package their deleterious racism. Do not misunderstand me, I want you to find the westernized ideal of success. I want to believe that you will use your success for good. I want to believe that I and your mother will help you to see the world for what it really is: both its hatred and its potential. Potential like you. We share the pressure: me as your teacher and you as my pupil. We will navigate this world together.

My child, I cannot wait until the day that I can love you.

Until we meet,

Your Unrealized Father