The way to honor the death of Nolan Wells is to examine our own relationships with non-Black people and to open a dialogue about the emotional and physical dangers our Black children face when they are in majority-white environments.
In my own family, the rate of success of Black boys in particular — in white spaces — is abysmal. One of my cousins, who I will call “Abraham,” lived in a community where he and his immediate family members were among the few Black residents. My cousin’s spirit was under constant attack. He asked his parents if God and Santa were white. A teacher tried to destroy him by dishonestly labeling him as a troublemaker when he displayed curiosity. His parents placed him in a new school to disrupt the educator’s negative messages and restore the child’s self-esteem.
As mental warfare encircled Abraham, I continued to dream dreams for him. I saw him as a Morehouse man who would make up for his years as an only one in white suburbia by meeting some of the best Black students from all over the country and the world at the HBCU: the sons of business owners, heads of state, preachers, civil rights lawyers, physicians, educators. Armed with this new, invigorated Black identity, he would choose a brilliant sister from Spelman and present her to me as his fiancée at one of our family gatherings.
As I dreamed, I also encouraged and sometimes harangued Abraham’s parents to place him in environments that celebrated his Black brilliance and beauty. A family friend once beseeched the parents to move to a flourishing Black community where both they and the child could thrive. Our words did not resonate.
I bought Abraham a Morehouse sweatshirt one holiday. He wore it for years until the threads unraveled and it literally fell from his body. Like the garment — the symbol of what could have been — Abraham deteriorated. After a series of tragedies and traumas, married with the death of a thousand cuts that is racism, he disappeared into the vortex of mental illness and has not been seen by our family for several years.
Another distant relative, a few years older than Abraham, is a delivery driver in a majority-white community. His parents combined have four degrees, but — seemingly unaware of the twice-as-good mantra — this young man chose to be embraced by a gaggle of white youths with menial jobs who host keggers and watch sports on the weekends. His son has fallen to the same fate, dropping out of an Ivy League college after a semester to perform menial jobs with a cadre of underachieving white males in whose favor the American system is rigged.
The list of such failures, both within and outside my circle, is exceptionally long.
Black adults must examine ourselves for the vestiges of inferiority that lurk in our hearts and rot our souls. Do we still think that white is right? Do we see it as a badge of honor that our children have many white friends? We must excise the self-loathing like the cancer that it is. Then we must raise children who are as calculating and deliberate as the systems designed to uplift people who do not look like them.
We must also establish protocols to support and protect our children. Actress Gabrielle Union has spoken openly about allowing her sons to walk the family dogs and then radioing the security at the development near her home where she has Black friends to watch out for her boys. After Wells’s death, a Black travel influencer said that she and her husband never allowed their son to overnight in the homes of white friends. Instead, all interracial sleepovers took place in her home, allowing the couple to control the environment for the safety of their son.
Adults must have direct conversations with the Black youths in our lives about the country we live in and set up protocols to keep them safe without snuffing out their independence. Why Nolan Wells died and who may be responsible for his demise may never come to light. As we offer his family our heartfelt condolences and lift them up in our prayers, we must aggressively prepare our children for the racial inequality and legal double standards that are as American as apple pie and baseball. And hope that nothing like this ever happens again.
Cheryl McCourtie is a Bronx-based writer who is working on her memoir, “How I Became African American.”pe that nothing like this ever happens again.
Cheryl McCourtie is a Bronx-based writer who is working on her memoir: How I Became African American.
