I recently attended a conference during which a speaker who addressed the issue of children and gang violence moved me. Soon after he began to speak, I thought about how gang culture is similar to many groups within our communities. I started to think about how gangs have a culture of their own, and that our Black children are often divided by the “colors” of their clothes rather than the “color” of their skin.
Just as I began to tell myself that our children must surely know that they are all Black, my mind flashed back to an incident that I witnessed a few days previously when I saw two children who were accompanying their mother as she shopped. One little boy (rather light-skinned) said to the other, “Nigga, you’re too Black.” The other little boy (who by now had begun to cry) quickly turned around and socked him! Their mother intervened, but by then it was clear that the children had internalized a message that would impact them for life--a message that had been intentionally implanted in our culture over 300 years ago.
