I remember the disorientation of being made a foreigner in a country whose history, like ours, was shaped in no small part by African people and their descendants. But I also remember something more complicated. Bogotá was not simply the place where someone rejected me. It was a place where I encountered another part of the Black Americas: the descendants of Africans who had made lives, communities, music, food, faith, politics, and futures in a country I was still learning to understand. I was not there as a tourist. I was at the start of building my own family through surrogacy, moving through the Americas while preparing to bring a child into a lineage that had survived a great deal to reach me. Someone was trying to tell me I was not human and did not belong. Yet I was also surrounded by evidence that belonging can travel, transform, and take root in places none of us could have predicted. The question that stayed with me was not really about that woman. It was about what makes a people rooted in a place, and who gets to decide.

There is a story gaining ground in some segments of Black America that answers that question by asserting that Black Americans are Indigenous to North America and that the African origins of our ancestors are themselves part of a historical deception. I understand the hunger beneath it. After centuries of being called outsiders, property, or guests in a country our ancestors built, it is understandable to say: We were here. We belong here.

I also want to be careful about what I am not arguing. Rutgers graduates raised me, and I became one myself. Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus was part of the intellectual world through which I first encountered the possibility that Africans may have reached the Americas before Columbus. That idea mattered to me because the history I was taught had too often positioned Europe at the center of every story, as though the Americas became meaningful only when Europeans arrived to name them. Evidence and ongoing scholarly debate point to pre-Columbian contact among Africans, Asians, Indigenous peoples, and others. The history of the Americas is larger than the European version, and I have no interest in making it smaller again.

But that is a different question from whether the ancestors of Black Americans were Indigenous to North America in the political and historical sense that Native nations are Indigenous peoples of this continent. It is also different from the claim that the Middle Passage, African ancestry, and the history of enslavement in the Americas are fabrications. The conspiracy is not the possibility that Africans crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. The deeper problem is the insistence that Black Americans must construct an entirely different origin story to establish that we belong.

I don’t want to trade one oversimplification for another. History is stranger, more interconnected, and more contested than the stories nations tell about themselves. Africans crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. That does not make the Middle Passage a fiction. Both things can be held in the same historical imagination. The Middle Passage happened. Africans were kidnapped, trafficked across an ocean, enslaved, and forced to labor throughout the Americas. We do not have to deny Africa to claim America. We do not have to deny Africa to claim ourselves. The truth is more astonishing than the myth.

My paternal Epps family was enslaved at Warner’s Grove in Virginia. After emancipation, my ancestors purchased property in Supply and Elmwood. My family appears together in the census and worshiped at Ebenezer Baptist Church, building a life inside a country that had only recently stopped declaring them property by law. My great-grandfather Matthew became a farm owner. That fact still catches something in my chest: within a single lifetime of freedom, my family moved from being possessed to ownership. Their descendants farmed, raised children, built institutions, worshiped, struggled, loved, and made a life inside a nation that had denied their humanity.

There is tragedy in that history, but there is also something almost mischievously joyful about it. They kept making a life. They bought land. They gathered. They raised children. They sang. They became somebody’s ancestors.

My ancestors were not Indigenous to North America in the political and historical sense that Native nations are Indigenous peoples of this continent. Their histories are rooted in sovereignty, peoplehood, land, and futures that are not ours to appropriate. The story of Black enslavement should not be collapsed into that history. But neither does that distinction require Black Americans to understand ourselves as perpetual foreigners, guests, or people without a claim to this place. There is another belonging: the belonging made through generations of birth, labor, love, memory, cultivation, resistance, and care. My ancestors made that belonging here. They did not need to be first to become of a place. What if belonging is not something we inherit as a possession, but something we make possible for one another?

And perhaps this is where the Foundational Black American (FBA) or  American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) story misses something profound. It assumes that Black dignity requires foundation or precedence. But why should our worth depend upon being rooted or first?

For all their differences, white nationalism and the most extreme versions of this Black origin story can end up mirroring one another in an unsettling way. Both make belonging a contest over precedence. Both can turn ancestry into a kind of title deed: we were here longer or first, therefore this is ours; you arrived later, therefore you must explain yourself. That is not to say these movements are equivalent. They emerge from radically different histories and positions of power. But they can share a grammar: purity, precedence, possession, exclusion.

You can hear that grammar in the contemporary politics of MAGA: the insistence that there is a “real” America to recover, that some people belong more naturally than others, that immigration is contamination rather than movement, that demographic change represents loss, and that the nation can be made whole by returning to an imagined past. The fantasy is always some version of the same promise: if we can determine who truly belongs, we can restore what has been taken from us.

But belonging built on exclusion is a fragile kind of belonging. It requires constant policing of the boundary between “us” and “them.” It needs someone to be the foreigner, the invader, the newcomer, the person whose presence explains our own insecurity. White supremacy has always depended upon stories about who is native, who is civilized, who is entitled to land, who deserves citizenship, and whose presence requires explanation while whose does not. It makes belonging something inherited rather than something made. I don’t want freedom on those terms. And I don’t think white people should want it either. There is a life beyond the exhausting bargain of having to be above someone else to feel secure in who you are.

Human beings have always moved. People have mixed, migrated, married, traded, conquered, survived, adapted, and created new communities. The history of the Americas is not a story of pure peoples arriving in neatly sealed categories. It is a history of encounter and catastrophe, displacement and survival, exploitation and invention. It is also a history of exchange: crops and languages, rhythms and religions, technologies and stories, families and ideas moving across oceans and borders. Black life in the Americas emerged from that complexity.

Standing in Bogotá, I was reminded that there is an older and richer story of exchange among the Black Americas than the one we usually tell. Africans were brought to what became Colombia through violence, and generations of their descendants made communities, cultures, and identities that are distinctly Afro-Colombian while remaining connected to a wider African diaspora. Colombia, like the United States, carries the contradictions of a hemisphere shaped by Indigenous peoples, European conquest, African survival, and generations of mixture and reinvention. I want to know more of that story, not as a footnote to American history, but as part of a shared hemispheric history.

I think of this as an anti-Columbian exchange: not the exchange that began with conquest and turned movement across the Americas into a machinery of extraction and hierarchy, but a different kind of exchange, people meeting people, culture meeting culture, Black America encountering Afro-Colombia not as an exotic elsewhere but as another part of the world we inherited and helped make. What would it mean to imagine the Americas not as a hierarchy with the United States at the top, but as a network of peoples continually making and remaking one another? Not merely migration, but exchange. Not extraction, but relationship.

That matters to me because Blackness itself has always been larger than one nation. Black genius was never confined to the United States. Neither was Black suffering. Neither was Black liberation. The Black Americas are still learning to tell their story.

What was stolen from Africa was not merely labor. It was knowledge, agricultural practice, craftsmanship, medicine, music, language, religious imagination, and ways of making community. Enslavement was a theft of genius disguised as a theft of labor. And what Black people created afterward was not evidence of how little had been taken from us. It was evidence of how much remained.

That is why the question of purity feels so inadequate to me. Black life in the Americas has never been pure. It has been disrupted, wounded, adaptive, creative, sensual, intellectual, funny, spiritual, stubborn, beautiful, and alive. It has carried memory across oceans and made new worlds from what survived. We should not need a fantasy of racial purity to make that history meaningful.

We can hold the possibility of pre-Columbian African contact alongside the documented history of the Middle Passage. We can honor Indigenous sovereignty without treating Black Americans as permanent outsiders. We can acknowledge the violence through which our ancestors arrived without allowing that violence to define the limits of our belonging. We can claim Africa and America. We can claim ancestry without needing supremacy. We can know where we came from without needing to prove that someone else came later.

That is part of what I find so compelling about Black freedom traditions. At their best, they have never been about exchanging places in a hierarchy. They have exposed the hierarchy itself. We were denied literacy and became teachers. Denied political power and became organizers. Denied citizenship and expanded its meaning. Denied protection and built movements that forced the law to reckon with human dignity. From bodies treated as commodities came music, literature, scholarship, families, institutions, and movements that changed the world. We didn’t simply survive the world that was made for us. We kept making other worlds.

That is why I think Blackness can be aspirational, not as a racial essence, and certainly not because Black people are morally superior, but because Black freedom traditions have repeatedly imagined a humanity larger than the order imposed upon us. Blackness can teach something to everyone, including white people, not because Black people possess some mystical virtue, but because the history of Black freedom offers a different answer to the question of what makes us worthy. Not purity. Not precedence. Not domination. Not being above someone else. The answer is relationship, creativity, dignity, freedom, and the capacity to make life where the world has tried to make life impossible.

The aspiration is not to become more like whiteness. And the answer to whiteness is not another racial mythology. Whiteness, at its most powerful, offers a narrow bargain: belonging through hierarchy, security through exclusion, identity through distance from Blackness and other people of color. It is not simply about white people. It is an arrangement that teaches people to confuse being above someone with being free.

Black freedom offers something more difficult and more beautiful: a freedom that does not require someone else to be beneath you.

That is why Black liberation has mattered far beyond Black people. Every time Black people have insisted upon our humanity, we have widened the possibilities of democracy itself. We have challenged the idea that dignity is something the powerful distribute downward. We have insisted that freedom is not freedom if it depends upon another person’s exclusion. We have made the table larger.

I think about that now as a father. My ancestors could not have imagined me. They could not have imagined the countries I would move through, the work I would do, or the family I would build through surrogacy. They could not have imagined their descendant standing in Bogotá, being told by a stranger that he did not belong, while carrying his family’s future across the Americas. But they made a way for someone they would never meet. Now I am responsible for doing the same.

That is the inheritance I want. Not the fantasy that Black people were always here. Not a mythology of racial purity constructed to answer another mythology of racial purity. Not the idea that we must prove we were first before we can say we belong. The more astonishing truth is enough: we came from Africa, survived the Middle Passage, became ancestors, and made lives where we were told only exploitation was possible. We made family where the design called for separation. We made culture where the design called for extraction. We made institutions where the design called for dispossession. We made beauty where the world expected only pain. We made freedom imaginable where the design called for domination.

I think again about that line in Bogotá, about the woman who decided I was a stranger in a place I had never claimed to own. I remember the absurdity of it now as much as the hurt. She could not have known that I was carrying a family history across borders. She could not have known the people whose names I carry, the land they worked, the institutions they built, the songs they sang, the children they raised, or the generations they made possible. She could not have known that I was on my way to a child who would inherit a story much larger than she could dream of.

My ancestors did not have to be first. They only had to live. And now, through them, I get to decide what kind of world I will leave for the child who comes after me.

Maybe that is the freedom worth inheriting: not the freedom to be first, but the freedom to belong without needing someone else not to. To know where we come from without being imprisoned by it. To make a home without turning the door into a weapon. To inherit a world and leave it more spacious than we found it.

Instead, there was a stretch of time, months, if I’m honest, years, when I began to notice how often I felt off in rooms I thought I belonged in. Not always unsafe. Not even disrespected in ways that were easy to name. But misaligned. Slightly diminished. Asked to contort. Requested, in subtle and repeated ways, to be less than myself in order to remain in relationship.

After living inside that tension for longer than I care to admit, I moved to Richmond, Virginia.

At the time, I framed the move as a return, to land, to family, to something slower and more rooted. That was true. What I did not say out loud was that I was also stepping into unfamiliar terrain. I was moving not only away from a place, but toward a different way of living altogether, one that required releasing spaces and relationships I had outgrown.

Those shifts did not happen cleanly. There was no single moment of clarity, no dramatic rupture, no Real Housewives moment of broken wine glasses over someone else’s head. What emerged instead was a growing urgency, a quiet insistence that something in my life was no longer in flow.

What I eventually had to confront was simple, but not easy:

I had mistaken proximity to people for care from those people.

Some of the relationships I stepped away from were longstanding. Others were visible, even influential. Many involved people who spoke the same language I did, people who, on the surface, shared my commitments, my politics, my sense of purpose. That overlap made it harder to name what was not working.

Because the harm did not announce itself as harm. It showed up as humor that lingered too long and cut too close. As being discussed rather than engaged. As a pattern of showing up for others without reciprocity, followed by accusations that I had somehow fallen short. As my body, my thinking, and my choices becoming objects of commentary rather than sites of respect. As an unspoken expectation that I remain flexible, accommodating, and generous toward others, while my own boundaries were treated as negotiable.

None of this occurred in isolation. It formed a pattern, one that became clearer the longer I stayed.

Over time, I realized that the pattern required my participation. It depended on my willingness to reinterpret what I was experiencing, to normalize discomfort, to remain in conversations where I was not actually being heard, or worse, where I was being maligned.

That is one of the more uncomfortable truths about harm: it often persists not because we don’t recognize it, but because we have learned how to live with it.

Leaving was not my first instinct. Like many people shaped in movement spaces, I believed deeply in repair. I believed in working things through, in accountability, in the possibility that relationships could evolve if honesty was met with care. I found the courage, at times, to speak plainly about what I was experiencing.

What became clear, however, was the difference between accountability and endurance.

Accountability asks for recognition, reflection, and change.

Endurance asks you to absorb harm and call it growth.

Too often, what we name as “doing the work” is simply staying in relationships that do not change.

My breaking point was not dramatic. It was, in many ways, predictable.

After stepping away from someone who had publicly diminished me, I was not met with curiosity or care. There was no effort to understand what had happened. Instead, I was encouraged to be more graceful, to soften my response, to consider the feelings of the person who caused harm.

What stayed with me in that moment was not just what was said, but what was being asked of me.

I was being asked to prioritize someone else’s comfort over my own dignity.

What made that realization land more deeply was how familiar it felt.

These were not people outside of political awareness. These were individuals fluent in the language of justice, people capable of naming structural harm, citing theory, and offering critique with precision.

Yet in the intimacy of relationship, something else was unfolding.

We shared politics. We did not share values.

That distinction is not minor. It is the fault line beneath many of our relationships, because it reveals something we are often unwilling to admit: shared ideology does not make us safe for one another.

That recognition forced a harder question: what does it mean to be in community with people who can articulate liberation but do not practice care?

This question feels especially pressing right now.

In recent weeks, there has been renewed attention to the legacy of César Chávez, including the experiences of women like Dolores Huerta and others whose contributions, and in some cases harm, have been minimized or left unaddressed in order to preserve a larger narrative.

The more difficult question is not simply what one leader did, but what a movement made possible, and what it refused to see. Movements do not only produce change. They also produce cultures. And those cultures can protect harm as effectively as they resist it.

What gets protected when accountability is delayed? Who carries the cost of that silence? What are we willing to overlook in order to maintain the appearance of unity?

These are not abstract questions. We answer them every day in how we relate to one another.

We minimize.

We excuse.

We reframe harm as misunderstanding.

We call it “nuance” when it is avoidance.

The same pattern appears in places that seem, at first glance, unrelated.

The rise of what is often referred to as the manosphere reveals a truth many are reluctant to engage: there is a profound hunger for belonging among men. When that hunger goes unexamined, it does not disappear, it organizes itself around dominance, grievance, and control.

These spaces offer affirmation without accountability, recognition without responsibility, and connection that does not require care for others.

It is easy to point to these communities as evidence of something broken elsewhere. It is harder to admit how often we replicate the same dynamics with better language.

Public figures like Charlie Kirk are often praised for their ability to gather large, enthusiastic audiences. Elon Musk is widely regarded as one of the most influential individuals in the world, shaping conversations across technology, politics, and culture.

Yet scale is not synonymous with care.

A following is not a community.

Influence is not accountability.

Power does not guarantee responsibility.

Much of what we celebrate as “community building” is simply audience aggregation without relational depth.

A similar dynamic can unfold in more intimate spaces.

Recently, Karamo Brown spoke publicly about choosing distance from colleagues after learning they had spoken about him in ways that felt misaligned with the care he expected. What stood out was not the incident itself, but the clarity of his response.

Even in spaces organized around empathy and transformation, harm can circulate without interruption.

The presence of shared values in theory does not guarantee their practice in relationship.

What does it mean when people who publicly advocate for care do not extend it privately? What does it take to step back, not out of retaliation, but out of self-respect?

Moments like these are often reduced to interpersonal conflict, but they reveal something more foundational.

Across friendships, movements, and political formations, the same question keeps surfacing: what are we actually building when we gather people together?

Recent moments of collective expression, like the “No Kings” protests, suggest that people are not only resisting existing structures, but searching for new ways to imagine belonging, leadership, and shared life.

That imagination will fail if it does not extend into how we treat one another.

If community is not grounded in dignity, if it does not require accountability, if it allows harm to move unchecked, it is not neutral. It is extractive. And it will reproduce the very conditions it claims to resist.

My own discomfort, I came to understand, was not incidental. It was diagnostic. It was evidence that something was out of alignment, not only interpersonally, but ethically.

Stepping away from those relationships was not triumphant. It was disorienting. There is a particular loneliness that comes from releasing people who are woven into your history, especially when others continue to associate you with those connections.

Part of me still hoped for reconciliation, even when I understood that returning would require abandoning myself.

There were moments of doubt. I questioned whether I had been too sensitive, whether I should have stayed longer, whether I had misunderstood what was happening.

Even in clarity, there was longing, for people to become different than they had shown themselves to be.

At the same time, something else was unfolding.

I encountered people, many of them strangers, who engaged me with a steadiness I had not previously experienced. They listened. They followed up. They paid attention in ways that did not require explanation or negotiation.

Therapy helped me name what I had normalized. Spiritual community introduced me to forms of connection not contingent on performance. Through hypnosis, I was asked to imagine what “home” felt like, and realized how often I had organized my life around endurance rather than ease.

I also returned, in a deeper way, to my family. The love there was not perfect, but it was recognizable, grounded, consistent, real.

All of this was unfolding as I prepared to become a parent.

The question is no longer abstract: what kind of community am I building, and what kind of community will my child inherit?

I know what I do not want them to learn.

That love requires self-abandonment.

That longevity equals loyalty.

That being cared for means being diminished.

Choosing differently became necessary.

Not as a single decision, but as an ongoing practice.

What I am learning is that this shift is not only about who we release. It is about what we are willing to build.

Community is not defined by agreement or shared identity. It is not secured by time. It is produced through practice.

It looks like people who check in without prompting. People who can receive feedback without defensiveness. Relationships where repair is possible because accountability is real. A willingness to be interrupted by another person’s truth.

It also leaves room for those who have caused harm, not through avoidance or denial, but through transformation.

Not everyone who harms is disposable. However, harm cannot be absorbed without consequence.

A community grounded in care holds both realities, the possibility of change, and the expectation of responsibility.

It asks: can you acknowledge what you have done? Can you sit with its impact without deflection? Can you demonstrate, over time, that something has shifted?

Without that, what we call community is simply proximity organized around comfort.

The relationships I am cultivating now are fewer, but they are clearer. There is less performance, less negotiation, more steadiness.

What has become clear is that this is not only a personal transformation. It is a political one.

The future we say we want will not be built only through policy or protest. It will be built through relationship, not algorithms.

If those relationships are not rooted in care, accountability, and dignity, then no amount of shared belief will save them.

Choosing yourself, in that context, is not withdrawal. It is alignment.

And it may be one of the most necessary conditions for building a community capable of holding us.

We are living in a moment that is asking more of all of us.

For those committed to movements built on fear, exclusion, and loyalty to power, there is another way to belong. Black and Indigenous traditions have long modeled forms of community rooted not in dominance, but in responsibility, where care is practiced, not performed, and where no one’s dignity is up for debate.

For liberals, the work is not simply to signal inclusion, but to examine the distance that still exists. Fear, especially of trans people, does not disappear because we rename it. It disappears when we choose relationship over avoidance, when we allow ourselves to be changed rather than protected.

And for those of us who consider ourselves radical or progressive, the most urgent question is this:

Are we living what we say we believe?

Because naming harm is not the same as interrupting it.

Apology is not the same as repair.

And community is not what we say, it is what we are willing to practice, especially when it is uncomfortable.

No one is exempt from this work.

If we are serious about building a different world, then we have to stop rehearsing the language of liberation and start embodying it, in our friendships, in our movements, in our everyday choices.

Anything less is just proximity.

The United States is not the first nation in the Americas to imagine itself whiter than it is. Yet, it should be the last.

The map of this hemisphere is littered with the wreckage of states that pursued white nationalism as national policy. The Dominican Republic’s 1937 Parsley Massacre, in which tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent and darker-skinned citizens were slaughtered under Rafael Trujillo, was justified as “border defense” but was, in truth, a campaign of erasure. Argentina’s whitening policies, which invited millions of Europeans while excluding Indigenous and Afro-descended communities, narrowed its labor force, its markets, and its global reach. Mexico’s long history of marginalizing Indigenous peoples, from the colonial caste system through 20th-century land dispossession, pushed millions out of economic and political life, weakened rural economies, and left an inequality so deep it still drives mass migration today.

These nations are not without beauty or resilience. But the shadow of racial violence has left them brittle, economies that sputter, cultures that second-guess themselves, and citizens who do not trust the nation to protect them.

White nationalism is not a path to greatness. It is a slow death by suicide.

Here in the United States, the tactics have shifted with the decades: genocide of Native peoples, racial segregation, mass incarceration, deportation, and voter suppression. Each act is presented as “security” or “order.” Each one dispossessed the nation of its most valuable resource, its people.

What we are seeing now from the Trump administration is not new. It is the same theology of control that imagines a smaller, whiter America will be a more cohesive and more prosperous state. The same calculus that prefers an empty field to a shared harvest if that field cannot be owned entirely by the settler. This shared harvest, however, is not a simple transaction. It is the collective prosperity that arises when diverse people contribute their unique skills, perspectives, and cultural strengths, enriching the nation's soil for everyone.

But look closely: every such “victory” is pyrrhic. When we cut people out, we cut out our past and our future.

History proves it. Countries that narrow themselves by race, religion, or origin don’t flourish. They shrink their markets, their culture, and their alliances. They lose the ability to adapt to a changing world. Even the U.S. has tested this and failed: the Chinese Exclusion Act gutted sectors of our economy for decades. The internment of Japanese Americans destroyed businesses and drained talent. The restrictive immigration quotas before 1965 slowed growth and left us lagging in global innovation.

Economists now warn that U.S. GDP growth will collapse without immigration. And to those who are unable to celebrate the beauty of diversity and fear that immigration strains our resources or lowers wages, the data shows that immigrants are a net positive for the economy, often paying more in taxes than they consume in services. States with the largest immigrant populations usually have the strongest economies. And communities that welcome newcomers tend to see lower crime rates, not higher ones.

The truth white nationalism cannot bear to face is this: Black and brown survival is not a threat to America, it is the only reason America has survived at all.

For Americans of European descent, this is an invitation to see yourselves differently, not as heirs to a brittle inheritance of dominance, but as co-creators of a future not organized around anti-Blackness. As related to your neighbors, culturally, economically, and yes, even by blood. This means refusing the seduction of policies that promise safety through exclusion. It means understanding that reparations, racial equity, and actual repair are not acts of charity or loss, but of national survival. In this context, reparations are not simply about a check, but about a commitment to healing historical trauma that the creation of race and systemic oppression have caused. A dedication to targeted investments in communities denied wealth for generations, a push for equity in housing and education, and a national reckoning with our past. This is the work of liberation from whiteness itself.

A homeland for whiteness is a homeland in decline.

We can still choose otherwise. We can reject deportation as destiny. Reject segregation as nostalgia. Reject incarceration as inevitable. We can choose to be unafraid of a nation that is more multilingual, more polyphonic, more complex than the one we were told to expect. We can embrace the work of reparations, not as punishment for whiteness, but as liberation from it.

Every act of white nationalism is an act of forgetting. But memory is still possible. Healing is still possible. And in that healing is a greater prosperity than whiteness has ever delivered.

The question is not whether America can survive without us. The question is whether America can survive without all of us.

Recently, I wrote about holding my child Oath close to my chest, our heartbeats against each other's, both of us amid newness. That moment, delicate and disorienting, marked the beginning of a longer inheritance, not just of fatherhood, but of a kind of kin work that stretches beyond biology and time.

I have never crossed into the ranks of a traditional fraternity. But lately, I have come to know a different kind of bond. A constellation of Black fathers, gay and straight, grieving and joyful, who recognize each other’s living without needing to explain a thing. There are no crests, ceremonies, or hierarchy, and no admission cost. This community consists of head nods, small gestures, and gentle questions asked on playgrounds.

The moments arrive unscheduled.

A young man, maybe twenty, serving ice cream, misgendered Oath in the best way by calling “her” beautiful, then corrected himself and asked about his diapers, sleep, and the literal and figurative cost of it all. Based on his questioning, I asked if he was expecting. He smiled and said Yes, thank you for congratulating me. In that moment, I became both a teacher of tenderness and a mirror of questioning. Our exchange took no more than a minute, but it was enough. He saw a future he could enter.

Sometimes I am strictly the student. A fellow Black father, a gay man, told me about his former marriage and their firstborn, diagnosed with kidney disease at birth. He had spent the first weeks of fatherhood split between two hospitals, one for his wife, one for his son. As he shared his story, Oath slipped on the stairs. The man reached for him without hesitation. Held him until I could. He gave me his number afterward, as kin do, noting that values and love would guide me along the way.

Sometimes I am simply a witness. At a playground, a father spoke to his daughter in three languages as we pushed our children on the swings. He asked me how old they were, noting Oath’s presence without assumption. We discussed funds, family, and a desire for more memories with additional children. He had just welcomed his second child a month earlier. I left feeling like I had entered a sacred exchange spoken in glances and small talk.

This is kinship. It is the daily presence of care, recognition, and naming one another in a world that so often forgets we exist. That knows nothing of our daily interactions and rituals. These moments are not exceptions. They are proof of a new imagination being lived in real time. One where Black fatherhood is not bound by myth or caricature, but expansive, curious, and abundant.

And it is not just us.

A month ago, I advocated on Capitol Hill alongside fathers, including Charles Johnson, whose wife Kira died giving birth to their second son. Charles turned his grief into fuel. He co-founded 4Kira4Dads because he knew that change demands presence. And sometimes presence must be loud.

And, that women, mothers, aunties, abuelas, lovers, and friends carry this kinwork with us. Their brilliance in raising, shaping, and stretching life into joy is about more than our support. It is our reverence. And still, kinship is not only the realm of those who give birth. We are shaped by those who choose to parent, who show up without fanfare. Coaches, godparents, chosen family. They build the scaffolding we rarely see. The kind we fail to celebrate; the actual foundation of our society.

I want a future that honors them all. One where Black fatherhood is not deemed as 'other' but simply is. Where care is not assigned to any one gender, or the family unity, but to all of us who exist. Where support structures are created not only to mitigate loss but to cultivate and sustain life. A future where policy is shaped by the real needs of caregivers, and where Black women are not only mentioned in memoriam but elevated in daily life. Where queer parenting is normalized, and children grow up with maps drawn by many hands. In a society currently obsessed with citizenship, I want a redesign. A reorientation to kinwork.

Because these brief moments, in shops, on sidewalks, and playgrounds, are already modeling something. A reimagining of family. A new documentation rooted not in paperwork or geography, but in how we show up for one another. In how we witness. In how we name love.

Maybe fraternity is not quite the right word. Too narrow. Too soaked in exclusion. What we are building feels more like a living network. A sacred common. Something ancient, but only now gaining its language.

And the invitation? That all of us, not just parents, become stewards of this future. That we notice. That we hold. That we act like our neighbor’s joy is our own. That we shape the future as the next ancestors.

There are things a body knows before the mind does.

The feeling of weightlessness, of breath, held tight,

of movement that can save or betray you.



I have always known water.

But I also know how easily it changes form.



JFK Recreational Center, Newark.

An Olympic sized stretch of blue,

across from the Prince Street Projects,

where Redman turned concrete into poetry.

Where kids played outside until the streetlights hummed on,

where the world expected us to be tough, to be unshaken.

But inside, we swam.

We became Olympians.

Black and Brown bodies moving through a sport

that did not think of us when it wrote its history.



The pool was ours.

Until the day it wasn’t.



I still see him.

A Black boy, younger than me.

Laughing, splashing, then still.

Face down at the bottom, arms outstretched,

as if waiting to be lifted, to be saved.

But no one saw him in time.



I remember the gasps when they pulled him out.

The way the water beaded on him,

refusing to let go until it evaporated.

The way his father returned to the pool too late,

the weight of that moment

settling in our chests like held air.



I did not understand then what I know now.

That life and death do not sit far apart.

That between them, there is only breath,

only the ability to agree to the pull

or refuse it.



Mark swam, too.

Faster than me, more attuned.

A champion. Bullish. A force.

He was resilient, moving as if nothing could hold him back.

But outside the pool, the currents were different.

I did not see, then,

the things that tried to drag him under.

I only saw the water, the light,

the proof that he was brighter than what tried to break him.



I see it now.

I see that survival is not always about speed,

but about endurance.

About the way he resurfaced,

again and again.

About the love I carry for him,

for all that he has been,

for all that he still is.



Robert Peace swam, too.

Brilliant, fast, sharp as the snap of a start gun.

People talk about where he went

as if that was the story.

The degree, the credentials.

But he carried Newark with him,

not as a weight, but as a heartbeat.

Not something to escape,

but something that made him who he was.



But even the strongest swimmers can be caught in the tide.

One night, one gun, one moment

not a drowning, but a taking.



And then, Cullen Jones.

One of us, but acclaimed.

A medalist.

Proof that we were never out of place in this water,

only unseen,

until forced to look.



Me?

Younger, or in the middle. Without pretense,

At the state championship, the final relay

I was supposed to dive.

But fear held me back.

So I started in the water,

knees bent, lungs tight.



Still, I won.

Because water does not ask you to be fearless.

Only to keep moving.



And the boy?

He was one of us, too.

Me, my brother, Robert, Cullen

we are all him, and he is us.

Black boys in the water,

learning the thin line between floating and sinking,

between surviving and being swallowed.



And maybe, somewhere,

another stands at the edge of the pool,

wondering if he belongs here.



Maybe he will hear these stories,

and know that he, too, was born with breath.



That he, too, can swim.

A dedication to all those special parents who raised us and the kids who are now adults who swam. To the coaches. For a community that knew we deserved, that has always celebrated our existence. On we go!

Oh, if you ever have the chance, please check out Stingrays, a film on the Newark Swimteam by LeRon E. Lee!

Parenting, at its core, is a long-term investment. It required from me a level of groundedness, patience, vision, and an unwavering belief in the future. As a single Black queer parent, I see myself less as my son’s architect designing him from scratch and more as his investor, his development coach. He is not my legacy, and my role is not to shape him into what the world expects but to cultivate who he is, his strengths, and his curiosity and ensure he has the tools to navigate the world on his terms.

But in many ways, the world was not built with children and certainly not Black children in mind. So, my approach to parenting also requires differences.

Black parenting in America has never been just about raising children. Our forced arrival to the Americas has required parenting to prioritize survival, resistance, and love in the face of systemic oppression. During enslavement, Black families had to find ways to pass down knowledge, culture, and resilience despite being forcibly monetized and exploited. In the era of segregation, Black parents prepared their children for a world that was destructive to them, instilling discipline, respectability, and a sense of communal responsibility. There are many potential lessons in the lost lives of our slain ancestors, Emmit Till, and Sandra Bland, including being humble in the face of danger.

Even in my own family, I see the echoes of this history. Like so many others, my parents raised me with love and vigilance. They knew the world would not be forgiving, so they taught me to be careful, morally sound, and navigate spaces not designed for me. Their approach was not about stifling me but about keeping me alive and well.

Yet, I find myself making different choices. Choices that could instill in my child the audacity to live life fully, like those of State Rep. Justin Jones and Harriet Tubman, America’s Moses. I am placing a priority on well-being over behavior.

My father, a lover of SunRa, shared with me the gift of Afrofuturism, which teaches us that the past, present, and future exist on a continuum. This means I accept the parenting strategies of my ancestors, nor do I unthinkingly repeat them. Instead, I see myself as part of an ongoing lineage, taking what serves us, leaving what does not, and envisioning what comes next.

I think of my child as part of that future. In Dad Genes Podcast, Black fathers discuss the importance of raising children to survive and thrive. They remind me that we are no longer only in the business of defense. We must also be on offense, building the kind of world we want for our children and shielding them from harm.

For me, this means rejecting the idea that my son should ever be small, silent, or overly obedient to be safe. He also should never need to be spoken to first before speaking. It means allowing him to take up space, express frustration as much as he expresses joy, and know that he is worthy simply because he exists. More importantly, as Kendrick Lamar states, he has royalty in his DNA; his lineage includes survivors and innovators. In Paternal Podcast, there’s a discussion about how children of color are often socialized into hyper-awareness of danger, while white children are encouraged to explore, be curious, and take risks. I refuse to let my son grow up believing that caution is his only path forward. However long or short his life is, it should be filled with complete and robust heartbeats.

Despite the data showing that Black fathers are among the most involved parents, the myth of the absent Black father remains deeply embedded in the public imagination. When people see me with my son, their responses range from astonishment to disbelief.

Like the woman in the park who, without asking, began changing my son’s diaper while I was already doing it, assuming I needed help. Or the conductors on an Amtrak train who were shocked that I took my infant with me to the bathroom. Or the male doctor who, seeing me alone with my child at an appointment, accused me of kidnapping him. Or those close to me who questioned whether my approach to “soft parenting” prepares my son for the realities of the world.

These moments are not just about me. They reflect a broader societal discomfort with the idea of Black men as primary caregivers. They reflect the lingering effects of a world that has long dictated what fatherhood should look like.

And yet, I see fathers, especially Black fathers, everywhere. At the playground, in the grocery store, pushing strollers through neighborhoods. I see them navigating the same scrutiny, assumptions, and challenges. I see them investing in their children’s futures, even when the world does not expect them to.

I do not parent my son as if white supremacy is an inevitability he must submit to. I parent him with the same intention that was required to navigate an international surrogacy journey as a single parent. It was a process that required admittance followed by therapy, background checks, and years of preparation to bring him into this world. That same level of intention is what I bring to his upbringing.

I want my son to know how to advocate for himself, question authority, and push back when he senses injustice or his own discomforts. I want him to see a world full of possibility, not just danger. And I want him to know that he does not have to shrink to survive, even if his cries annoy the other plane passengers or his shrieks discomfort the other shoppers in the supermarket.

For generations, Black parents have had to make impossible choices, whether to prioritize safety or self-expression, survival or joy. But I believe that at this moment, we can do both. We can honor the past, live fully in the present, and actively shape a future where our children do not have to choose between free and safe.

Parenting is not just about what we teach our children but about what we choose to unlearn. I am unlearning the idea that my child must make himself small to be protected. Instead, I am teaching him to be a brat like Kamala Harris, radical like Angela Davis, or assiduous like Zora Neale Hurston. To stand tall, dream big, and take up all the space he needs.

His name is Oath, meaning to bear divine witness. I chose it as both a counter-narrative and a declaration—that he is seen, that he belongs, that he is backed by love and community.

An oath is more than a promise; it is a commitment to shaping the future with intention. I parent with that same conviction not just to protect my son but to raise him in love, power, and possibility.

We all have a role in this work, especially in this moment. Whether as parents, mentors, or community members, we can choose to invest in children not just to survive but to thrive. To raise them with the audacity to be free. To be loud. To take up space. To rest or protest. To dismantle structures and or build anew.

This is how we shape the world to come. This is how we keep our oaths. Because the world is changing, and I am raising my son to change it even more.

A special father’s thank you to my mother, who has filled my and Oath’s world with sustenance and possibilities. To my godparents, who are proof that angels walk amongst us. To Oath’s godparents whose love, generosity, and guidance have been a constant and to a village of cousins, friends, and people who do stop, and stare, and smile at us. God's grace is indeed sufficient. To Rev. M. William Howard, Jr.: Thanks for the prompt to join Substack. And to Oath, thanks for coming into the world and allowing me to be your parent. You are loved, adored, and supported.

White identity was created to serve as a benchmark for American identity, but with built-in roadblocks, gatekeepers were established to preserve privileges assigned to it. People descended from Africa who have claimed Blackness have long been framed as a counterpoint to American ideals, often positioned as an obstacle to the so-called “mainstream” rather than the reality and its foundation. But what Kendrick laid bare on that stage is that Black genius and innovation, including its culture through its artistry and resistance, has always been at the heart of what America claims to value: creativity, freedom, and liberation. His performance, a masterclass in visual and sonic afro-futurism, reminded us that Black people are not just survivors of America’s failures but architects of both its most foundational and radical possibilities.

Kendrick’s performance stands in a lineage of Black artists and athletes who have used mainstream platforms to assert power and autonomy. Serena Williams’ now iconic Crip Walk after winning Olympic gold in 2012 wasn’t just a celebration it was a flex, a reminder that Black people can carry their whole selves into any space and redefine it. The C-Walk, a dance birthed in the streets of Compton, was never meant to be performative for white approval. When a Crip did the walk, you knew you were on their turf. And so, it was, and remains, a symbol of sovereignty, a statement that Black presence is not just a casualty but dominant.

That same energy was present in Kendrick’s halftime show. His performance wasn’t watered down for mass appeal; it was an assertion of Black creativity, a refusal to dilute the message for those who might find it uncomfortable. It was the same spirit that made Serena’s C-Walk so potent: the unspoken truth that Blackness doesn’t need permission or translation to be excellent, unapologetic, or in control. If anything, to own Blackness, its inherited notion of freedom in the face of violent white supremacy, is a privilege. 

Lamar's performance is also an ode to Afrofuturism. The idea and reality is that despite the white supremacy project, Black people will exist in the future. He demonstrated that Afrofuturism is more than an aesthetic; it is a way of seeing Black existence beyond the limitations of oppression. It is the radical belief that Black people have a future not just as footnotes in history books but as the protagonists of a narrative that America has yet to embrace. Kendrick’s performance, like the work of Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, and Janelle Monáe, insisted on Blackness as a continuum, a past, present, and future that cannot be erased, no matter how fervently white supremacy tries.

The message is a counter narrative to what America is supposed to be and one many did not easily digest. In a moment when Black identity, its history, and ideals are being legislated out of textbooks, and opportunities in academia and the workplace and while Black voters are being systematically disenfranchised, Kendrick’s performance was a declaration: we have always been here, we will always be here, and we are the ones shaping what comes next. The imagery, the lyrics, the defiant energy it was all a reminder that the future of America is Black, not in exclusionary terms but in the sense that Blackness, as a philosophy, has always been a blueprint for true democracy.

Of course, not all public displays of Black culture serve this higher purpose. While Kendrick and Serena have wielded their platforms to challenge the status quo, others have opted for capitulation. Snoop Dogg and Nelly’s participation in Donald Trump’s inauguration was a stark reminder that proximity to power can sometimes come at the cost of integrity. The alleged quid pro quo of New York City Mayor Eric Adams serves as another example. Their willingness to align with an administration that openly stokes racial division for financial profit was not just disappointing; it is the antithesis of Black freedom and an American future.

Black sovereignty does not beg for acceptance from white supremacy; it exists in defiance of it. Kendrick’s performance embodied this principle, presenting Blackness not as something to be appropriated but as something to be studied and revered. It was a lesson in what it means to lead with conviction, to reject the compromises that dull Black power in exchange for temporary access to whiteness and its privileges. A lesson too many folks will need as the facade of diversity initiatives continues to collapse. 

To be Black in America is to exist in constant negotiation with systems designed to erase, exploit, and contain. And yet, Black creativity has remained the most potent force of transformation in American life. What Kendrick demonstrated on that stage is that Blackness is not just something to be feared or fetishized; it is something to be embraced, studied, and, most of all, loved.

This is an urgent message at a time when America is flirting with authoritarianism. Fascism thrives on rigidity, nihilism, and exclusion, while Blackness, in its purest form, is improvisational, forward-thinking, and inclusive. It is a framework for survival and joy. As bell hooks once wrote, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is to imagine what is possible.” Kendrick’s performance was that kind of art.

For those who see Blackness only through the lens of struggle, his performance was resistance. But for those willing to listen and see, it was an invitation, an opportunity to understand that Blackness is not just about survival but about creating a world where freedom is not a privilege but a given. The question is whether America is ready to diverge from its past of enslavement and segregation and accept that future. Because, as Kendrick reminds us, it is coming regardless. Blackness is America’s blueprint.