How Do I Teach My Children The Truth Without Teaching Them To Fear Half Of Who They Are??

The death of Nolan Wells raised legitimate questions. The reaction raised another: How do Black parents prepare our children for racism without teaching them that every white person is a threat?

On July 4, 18-year-old Southwest Mississippi Community College football player Nolan Wells traveled to Horn Island with friends.

He never made it home.

His body was found two days later, and before investigators could publicly establish exactly how he died, much of the country had already decided what his death meant.

The public saw a young Black man, images of him among white friends and a mysterious death in Mississippi. For many people, that picture carried enough history to complete the story without waiting for the evidence.

I understand that reaction.

America has given Black families plenty of reasons to question the first official explanation. Nolan’s family deserves transparency, a complete investigation and real answers about what happened to their son.

But questions are not conclusions.

The publicly available evidence has not established that Nolan was murdered or that his death was racially motivated. The official findings have not been publicly released, while the independent autopsy listed both the cause and manner of death as undetermined.

That does not mean nothing happened.

It means we do not yet know what happened.

Somewhere between justified suspicion and manufactured certainty, Nolan’s death became part of a much larger conversation about Black children, white friends and whom we teach our children to trust.

For me, that conversation is not theoretical.

MY HISTORY DID NOT BEGIN ON SOCIAL MEDIA

My mother was born in Mississippi in 1953.

Think about that year.

Brown v. Board of Education had not been decided. Emmett Till was still alive. The Civil Rights Act was eleven years away.

Her family is from Jonestown, Mississippi, and she attended Jackson State University. My father’s family comes from Kentucky. I grew up in Tennessee.

Racism is not a chapter I discovered in a textbook. It sits inside my family’s timeline.

It lives in the places that raised us, the warnings passed between generations and the things older Black people learned to recognize before anybody else in the room noticed them.

Nobody needs to explain to me why Black parents are cautious.

I come from the people who gave that caution its receipts.

But my mother taught me something deeper than caution. She taught me how to see people.

I watched how she interacted with white people. I saw the relationships she formed and the respect that could exist across racial lines. She understood racism without deciding that every white person represented the worst of white history.

She never hid the truth from me.

She also never handed me a list of enemies.

That distinction shaped the man I became. It is also why I do not see every racial situation the same way some of my fellow Black Americans do.

That does not make me disconnected from Black history.

It means I learned from someone who lived closer to it.

MY FAMILY IS NOT A RACIAL ARGUMENT

My wife is white.

We have been together for more than fifteen years and married for thirteen. She has two younger brothers who are mixed.

Our children are Black and white.

They are growing up in Idaho while carrying family roots that run through Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee. Their home contains more than one American experience because their family does too.

So when somebody tells me I need to teach my children not to trust white people, I have to ask:

Who exactly am I warning them about?

Their mother?

Their family?

Their uncles?

Their classmates and teammates?

Part of their own identity?

I cannot teach them that one side of their family is automatically dangerous while the other side is automatically safe. That is not preparation.

That is confusion dressed up as protection.

My children should never believe that loving their mother makes them less connected to their Blackness. They should never feel that learning Black history requires them to reject the white people who love them.

They are not a racial contradiction that needs to be solved.

They are whole human beings.

I intend to raise them that way.

But whole does not mean blind.

Having a white mother will not protect them from every racist person, biased institution or unequal situation. The world may identify them differently depending on who is looking. One person may see mixed children. Another may only see Black children. Somebody else may question whether they belong to either community.

I have to prepare them for those moments.

They need to recognize when curiosity becomes disrespect, when a joke is not just a joke and when discomfort is becoming danger. They need to know when to speak, when to leave and when to call home.

That is awareness.

Teaching them to expect hostility from every white person would be something else.

One prepares them to navigate the world.

The other traps them inside it.

IDAHO CARRIES BOTH STORIES

My children are growing up in a state where Black people make up roughly 1.2% of the population.

Idaho also has a documented history of white-supremacist activity. The Aryan Nations operated its compound near Hayden Lake, attracted extremists and helped stain the reputation of an entire state.

My children should know that history.

They should also know what happened next.

People in Idaho organized against the Aryan Nations. Religious leaders, attorneys, residents and civil-rights advocates fought back. An Idaho jury eventually returned a $6.3 million civil judgment that bankrupted the organization and cost it the compound.

The hate existed.

So did the resistance.

Both belong to Idaho’s history.

I will not lie to my children about the compound, but I will not erase the people who helped destroy it either.

If I only teach them about the racists, I am not giving them complete history. I am teaching them hopelessness.

History should show children what people are capable of doing to one another.

It should also show them what people are capable of doing for one another.

BLACK CAUTION HAS REAL RECEIPTS

The numbers do not allow us to pretend everything is equal.

Research examining American children ages 1 through 19 found that the homicide rate for Black youth between 2016 and 2020 was more than ten times the rate for white youth. Firearm mortality also fell disproportionately on Black children.

Those disparities are real.

They demand attention, investment and honesty.

But those numbers do not establish that interracial friendships are inherently dangerous. They do not prove that predominantly white communities are uniquely responsible for Black youth deaths, and they cannot tell us what happened to Nolan Wells.

Data can reveal a pattern.

It cannot be forced to solve an individual case.

That is where these conversations often lose their discipline. We take real history, add a real racial disparity, place both beside an unresolved tragedy and then call our conclusion obvious.

It may feel obvious because it resembles something that has happened before.

That still does not make it evidence.

We can question the first explanation without inventing a replacement. We can acknowledge history without using it to convict people before the facts arrive.

That is not choosing white comfort over Black caution.

That is refusing to let anybody’s fear define reality before the evidence does.

WHITE PARENTS DO NOT GET TO SIT THIS OUT

My refusal to teach racial fear is not permission for white families to ignore racism.

If Black parents are being asked not to hand their children automatic mistrust, white parents must be asked not to hand their children automatic innocence.

Saying “My child does not see color” does not finish the work.

Teach your children why a Black parent may hesitate before allowing a child to enter an unfamiliar space. Teach them why Mississippi carries a different weight inside some families and why a Black teenager can experience the same classroom, traffic stop, party or team differently than a white friend standing beside them.

Teach them not to become defensive every time racism is discussed.

Being personally innocent of history does not make anyone personally exempt from understanding it.

Black children should not inherit hatred.

White children should not inherit denial.

Neither one prepares them to live honestly with the other.

WHAT MY MOTHER ACTUALLY TAUGHT ME

My mother did not teach me to ignore race.

She taught me not to surrender my judgment to it.

A person’s race may tell me something about the history that shaped their life. It does not tell me everything about their character.

Actions do that.

Choices do that.

The way people treat others when there is no reward for doing the right thing does that.

I have experienced racism. I have also known white people who trusted me, stood beside me, opened doors for me, loved me and became family.

Acknowledging one truth does not cancel the other.

That is not being whitewashed.

It is refusing to become intellectually lazy in either direction.

I am not defending white people from Black history.

I am defending my children from the idea that history has already determined everyone they can trust.

WHAT I WILL TEACH MY CHILDREN

I will teach them Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Idaho.

They will learn about slavery, segregation, civil rights, redlining and the systems that did not disappear simply because the signs came down.

They will also learn cultural pride, situational awareness, self-respect and discernment.

I will teach them to trust their instincts without pretending fear can never influence those instincts. They will know they do not have to remain somewhere unsafe just to avoid appearing rude. They will know not to abandon a friend, to ask questions before repeating accusations and that demanding evidence is not a betrayal of Black people.

I will teach them that loving their white mother does not make them less Black.

I will teach them that loving their Black history does not require rejecting the white people who are part of their history too.

Most importantly, I will teach them that they can judge people individually while remaining aware of the systems surrounding them.

Nolan Wells’ family deserves the truth about what happened to their son.

The people around him should not be convicted by the internet without evidence.

Both statements can exist at the same time.

That is not weakness.

That is not neutrality.

That is discipline.

History should inform our judgment. It should sharpen our awareness and help us recognize patterns before they become tragedies.

But it should not make every decision for us before the evidence arrives.

I refuse to raise naïve children.

I also refuse to raise frightened ones.

And I damn sure will not teach my children to fear half of who they are.

That is not being whitewashed.

That is teaching them how to be whole.

— Alexander Thomas “Kunta” Moore No Hype Needed | Knox•Moor