Marita Golden - Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (New Edition) (Parenting Black Teen Boys, Improving Black Family Health and Relationships)

Praise for
Saving Our Sons

It is always heartening to see women step up to the writers table. When the results are as adroit and affecting as Marita Goldens work, it is more than satisfying; it is a cause for cel ebration.

Toni Morrison , Nobe l Laureate

Marita Golden has captured the special pain that shadows the joy of Black parenthood in these turbulent times. Elegantly written, this book is a brea kthrough.

Chica go Tribune

A wonderful storyteller, an uncompromising mind, Marita Golden explores the African-American experience in a completely orig inal way.

Newsweek

In this book, Marita reminds us why every black parent should be vigilant and intentional in considering how to steer young black boysand girls as wellthrough the precarious passage to adulthood. Saving Our Sons is disturbingly relevant in this, the twenty-first century. Its a compell ing read.

Nathan McCall , author of Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America

Marita Goldens Saving Our Sons was revelatory when first published and remains so today. Saving Our Sons is a superb mothers, artists, teachers, and community activists love story of her son and by extension, all Black sons. This is a book that provides life lessons for our daughters too. Saving Our Sons is critical as a guide, motivator, love-note, and an avenue into lifesaving discussions of the heart for all Black children.

Haki R. Madhubuti, founder of Third World Press and author of Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous (1991) and Taught By Women: Poems As Resistance Language , New and Selec ted (2020)

Saving
our
Sons

Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World

Marita Golden

Coral Gables

Copyright 2022 by Marita Golden
Published by Mango Publishing, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

1995. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1995.

Cover Design and Art Direction: Morgane Leoni
Cover Photos: Tatiana Katsai | Prostock-studio | liderina | stock.adobe.com

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Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2021952510
ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-893-2, (e) 978-1-64250-894-9
BISAC category code FAM043000, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Life Stages / Teenagers

Printed in the United States of America

This book is for my son, Michael, with thanks for growing with me, for the generosity of his spirit, and for allowing me to reveal his life to others as the gift I have always kno wn it was.

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants h im to be.

A udre Lorde

No black mother grows up in this city or any city without fearing for her sonNo black mother doesnt fear. I dont think a black person can get away from it.

Sylvia Snowden (mother of Malik Butler, who was murdered on a Washington, DC, stre et corner)

Table of Contents

I met Marita Golden years ago when I was a reporter for the Washington Post. At the time, I was learning my way around Washington, DC. Marita moved among a flourishing group of Black writers in the city. In our encounters at cultural events around town and through reading her work, I saw Maritas passion for exploring the human condition, not only as a writer, but also as a worl d citizen.

I had been a fan of Maritas work since reading her first book, Migrations of the Heart. It was a searing account of her marriage to a Nigerian man and her subsequent relocation with him to the Motherland. In her four years living in Nigeria, she birthed a son and grew to appreciate an experience that most African Americans only dream ofliving in a nation where Blackness is the norm. In Migrations of the Heart , Marita also chronicled the cultural and gender-related clashes with her husband that ultimately doomed her marriage and drove her to return to the Unit ed States.

It was apparent from Migrations and the books that followed that Maritas work as an artist reflects a drive to examine issues and seek answers to some of Black Americans most pressing concerns. So it came as no surprise when her focus landed on her young son who, as a young Black male, inherited the dubious distinction of being labeled an endangered species in America. This book, Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World, is the story of how Marita, then a single mother, set out with a fierce determination to raise an African-American boy in a country hostile to his very existence.

There is an obvious irony that made Saving Our Sons seem like an extension of Migrations of the Heart : Marita was struck by the fact that in Nigerian society, sons are held in high esteem. In America, however, the opposite is true. Black males are generally devalued and often treated as cogs in a nefarious school-to-prison-pipeline, where sizeable head counts bring vast profits on the New York Stock Exchange.

Year after year, the data about Black boys prospects in life yields distressing news: Black boys are more likely than their white peers to be expelled from school. Black boys are more likely than others to be committed to detention centers for juvenile infractions. Homicide is a leading cause of death among Black males under the age of t wenty-one.

Marita, faced with such a daunting reality, squarely confronted the probabilities of what might happen if she failed to help her son, Michael, navigate the pitfalls that awaited him, not only in the mean streets, but also in virtually every white-run institution that he would encounter over the years as he tried to find his way i n America.

For me as a Black man, Saving Our Sons resonated in ways that are deeply personal. In a sense, I represent the embodiment of the nightmare that Marita hoped to avert in raising her son. I wrote about my journey in my autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America. I chronicled my passage from being a smart kid in elementary school to a corner boy by the time I reached junior high. Before all was said and done, I had shot a man in the chest at point-blank range and later committed an armed robbery that resulted in a twelve-year prison sentence.

As Marita noted in Saving Our Sons , such tragedies dont exist in a vacuum; they impact entire families and often sweep like cyclones through whole communities. I eventually managed to recover from my travails, but not before inflicting a great deal of collateral pain on my family and on others.