Raising a Black Child in America When a Cause of Death is Racism

This essay was written five days before the Madison, WI police killing of Corey Ruiz on July 22, 2026.

I am a Black mother to a Black child in the U.S.  The deaths of teenagers Nolan Xavier Wells and Daniel Erving remind me of the perilousness of growing up Black in the U.S.

Raising our child, as many Black parents of Black children do in the U.S., involves a particular kind of observation. What are we looking for?  We are looking, without delusion, for the moment when we believe our children can understand, without falling to pieces, that they are Black in the U.S. We want to sense the moment when they are able to comprehend the unrelenting threat that the state (or vigilantes) may make an unjust claim on our body and our life.  Sometimes during those observations, we may recall our own experience growing up and trying to comprehend that the culture of our nation could be a psychological and mortal threat.  And  if we are ‘good enough’ Black parents, we also parent with angst-ridden discernment about our children’s developmental stages as we also look at our children with awe of their evolving intelligence, consciousness, and conscientiousness. We are trying to practice equanimity whether we know it or not, whether we are Buddhists or not.

As Black parents observe our maturing Black children and discern the inflection points of their developmental stages, we must learn joy and dread. If any ragged joy is to be had in this life in this country, we must learn to live with the dread of knowing that our children are subject to prematurely-foreshortened lives -- just as we have been -- and where they may have to consider bleak futures, just as we probably did. The joy is in the resilience.  This is what the death of Wells and Erving are reminding me. 

I mourn for the Wells and Erving families and vow as a Buddhist to not let equanimity philosophies and practices freeze me into pretending that I don’t feel the burn of Black families being subjected to U.S.-branded racial violence.  In meditation, I felt the flame of anger arise, and I chose not to douse it in dharma-softening deep breathing.  I wanted the heat of the anger to rise to a clarifying level.

Black parents raising Black children must decide when and how to talk to our children about a U.S. culture that is largely unaffirming, invalidating, and terrified of the actualized and realized Black person.  This paranoia does not reflect the reality of the Black child. Rather it is in our collective consciousness as residue of our colonialist history, centuries of slavery, racial degradation, and present land occupation. This bizarre paranoia easily and repeatedly gets stirred up and vomited out for political gain and the justification of human rights atrocities like mass deportation of people of color through deception and violence. 

As I reflect on Wells and Erving and their families, I am also reminded that conscientious parents of Black children (including people of various ethnic and racial heritages) hope that we get the timing and words right without shattering our child’s ability to be psychologically whole.  We wonder whether the child has developed enough ego-strength and confidence to know themselves as worthy of love and respect despite what is said about them, how they are treated, or who is killed.  We practice Right Speech, whether we are Buddhist, or not. 

Will we choose the words arrest or imprison; court or sentence; jail or prison; fine or penalty; jury or mob; private attorney or public defender; life sentence or parole or any combination of these words to let them know that their bodies may ultimately belong to the prison industrial complex, a racist mob, the deportation industrial complex, or a group of “friends”?  Do we want them to know that there are quotas and profits and racial profiling that reify the bizarre paranoia of an actualized and realized Black person?  How and when do we talk about language profiling to identify who belongs in the U.S.?  Like all good parents, Black parents don’t want our children to be as anxious as we were and yet, we want them to survive, thrive, and be joyful.  Still, in a culture as threatening as ours, there will be anger because there is danger.  Where will this anger find its clarity?  I found it in my heart of love for my child and our children.

Attorney Ben Crump was retained by the Wells family on July 7th and on July 13th by the Erving family.  I am grateful for Crump and the Crumps of this country who believe wholeheartedly that Black Lives Matter and that justice should be served when Black people are murdered. Sadly, I would prefer that the Crumps did not have to do the work they do. 

In the meantime, we must continue to observe our children in awe while we hold the existential dread of being and parenting in the U.S.  We must enthusiastically and audibly affirm and validate our children’s growth and – when the time is right in their intelligence, consciousness, and conscientiousness – also find ways to warn them of the dangers of living in the U.S.. Parents will not always get it right, especially as we grapple with the real possibilities that our children’s white friends may become complicit in their premature demise.

Today, in meditation, these words came together: “Today, I will tell my Black child to only be with their white friends in public places where there are also Black adults.”  After meditation and after some consideration about how impolitic the sentiment might be received, I posted it on Facebook anyway, because after a good decade of convincing ourselves that the U.S. could not possibly go the way of fascism, I wanted to encourage other parents of Black children to share this message with their children.  We must awaken to the dangers before us, the dangers that seek to intimidate, incarcerate, obliterate, and also deport  Black people by using “reverse migration” for all non-white people. 

Buddhism is about awakening, understanding the causes of suffering, and working with wisdom and skillfulness to mitigate the suffering.  It is difficult to awaken when there’s so much distracting chaos.  Our life task, as Buddhist practitioners, is to see through the chaos by stitching together the causes and conditions as we find them, and laying out the fuller yet ill-fitting garment of greed, delusion, and ignorance for the world to see, then alter.  What else helps the world know the trouble we have seen?

I know foundational Buddhism doesn’t provide direct parenting advice, but the absence of wisdom and philosophy about child rearing doesn’t mean we should not bring into practice what we know about how to raise a healthy Black child.  Before those law-and-order, crime-related words enter our children’s psyche, let’s be dedicated to observation, discernment, validation, and affirmation.  Let’s raise our children with the perfections of character, and let’s be intentional about directing our compassion, lovingkindness, equanimity and sympathetic joy towards Black children without predicting and controlling their futures.  

And to the Wells and Erving families, we hear you, we mourn with you, and we support you in your quest for accountability and justice.

Bio:

Pamela Ayo Yetunde, M.A., Th.D. is a parent, a pastoral counselor, spiritual director, chaplain, and author.  Her pastoral counseling doctorate was based on a marriage and family therapy curriculum.  Ayo is the co-founder of Buddhist Justice Reporter.