At The Atlantic: Clint Smith on Black Parenting in Age of BLM

Poet Clint Smith, author of the award-winning 2017 collection, Counting Descent, discusses being a black parent in the age of Black Lives Matter. "And yet an obvious difference exists between this moment and that one," says Smith in reference to the murders that took place a few years ago. "Today, all of this is transpiring during a global pandemic that is disproportionately killing black people in America." More, from The Atlantic:

While some may claim, implicitly or explicitly, that this disparity is simply a result of cultural or individual shortcomings, black coronavirus deaths are not the result of personal failings. They are the result of housing segregation, medical discrimination, low-wage jobs, and lack of access to health care; they are the result of history.

This is part of the story that my parents had to explain to me, and that I will one day explain to my own children—that so many in our community find themselves in these conditions not because black people have done something wrong, but because of all the wrong that has been done to black people. Many are now familiar with the other conversations that black parents have with their children, the conversations in which parents attempt to tread the line of making their children aware of the realities of the world, without making them feel as if it is somehow their fault. I experienced these conversations as a child, and will one day have to find a way to have them with my own children. A conversation that is more central to my life at the moment, however, is the one that black parents are having with one another.

Read on at The Atlantic.