“Sweetheart, forever and always, your beautiful Black life matters and you’re loved fiercely, no matter what the world around us tells you.”
So writes lawyer Anthony N. Morgan to his young daughter as part of a collection of thoughts on racism in this country in today’s Insight section,
To my daughter, Daddy loves you very much. I know you know and feel this every time we’re together. But I also know that as a Black child, it’s important that you’re reminded of this early and often.
You’re growing up in a world where, despite my best efforts, I’m not able to insulate you from recurring media cycles, images, attitudes or experiences that sting with the soul-throbbing pains of anti-Black racism. None of what you will be made to feel and experience because of this is your fault. My heart aches at thinking about what it will be like for you weathering antiBlackness.
Though I will give you all I can, nothing I have done or will do will keep you from times where you feel that, because you are Black and especially because you are a Black girl, you are unloved or that you’re somehow not as special, valued and as treasured as you are. Sweetheart, forever and always, your beautiful Black life matters and you’re loved fiercely, no matter what the world around us tells you.
You can’t read this yet. But one day, you will. When you do, you won’t remember what these past few days and weeks have looked and felt like for our Black communities in our city and across the African diaspora. My love, it’s been really sad and painful. Not because it’s new — because it isn’t.
By the time you read and fully understand this letter, I’m sure your generation’s technology will show you the pictures and articles on what this moment is meaning for our movement for Black freedom.
What they are describing as riots, are rightful expressions of Black resistance. All people have the right to fight for the protection of their humanity, dignity and well-being of their communities, by any means necessary.
What I mean is, if the people really experienced lives and histories where they could legitimately and reasonably feel they had other options than to burn and break things to protect their Black lives, they would not burn and break things, my love.
I hope and trust that you will learn from daddy to recognize that the fires of racist social, political, cultural and economic neglect burned long before those buildings. And learn to realize that these systems that are said to be meant to protect us were broken in anti-Black ways well before any of those replaceable pieces of property were damaged.
Black lives aren’t similarly replaceable. That’s part of the point our people are making and have been making since our first revolts against enslavement centuries ago.
For you, the names George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, D’Andre Campbell and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, will be what the names
Raymond Lawrence, Kenneth Allen, Marcellus François, Presley Leslie, Sophia Cook, Michael Wade Lawson, Lester Donaldson, Anthony Griffin, and too many more, are to me.
I hope you will remember these dead in how you grow to live your Black life: free, full, happy and resistant to anything that threatens this, your birthright.
Daddy loves you.