I was twenty years old, sitting in an admissions office at Nebraska Wesleyan, when I heard my white mother say something to the woman across the desk that I still hear some nights when I close my eyes. “How is he going to make it here if he couldn’t even make it there.”
She was talking about my grades from junior college, the classes I’d failed and the ones I’d dropped along the way. She wasn’t wrong about the record sitting in front of her. But she said it out loud, right next to me, to a Black woman who worked in that admissions office, and something in me went quiet.
I remember looking at that counselor and thinking we shared a piece of history she might understand, that maybe she’d understand me in a way my mom couldn’t. Instead I sat there as a young Black man while my white mother questioned whether I could handle college-level work, and I felt every ounce of that doubt while the one person in the room who looked like me watched it happen.
My mom had seen me struggle for years, and I believe her fear came from love. But something changes when you say it out loud in front of somebody else instead of just to your kid alone. It turns from worry into evidence, into what your child comes to believe about themselves, whether you meant it that way or not.
There's a name for this. It's called the soft bigotry of low expectations, a quiet and often well-meaning belief that a Black child needs less asked of them because less is what people assume they can handle. Most of the time it doesn't look like meanness. It looks like an honest fear, spoken at the wrong moment in front of the wrong person to a kid who never forgets a word of it.
For two and a half years after that, every assignment and every final and every night in my dorm room traced back to that one sentence. I wasn’t in it to learn anymore. Every page was about proving my own mother wrong.
If you’re raising a Black child right now, this is the age where every word you say to them does one of two things. It reassures them, or it teaches them exactly what you believe they’re capable of. The Year-by-Year Milestones Guide breaks down what your child needs from you at each stage, so your fear for their future doesn’t come out sounding like doubt in their ability. You can find it at https://payhip.com/b/GTRsK.
I finished that degree, put my pencil down on the last final I'd ever take there, and thought, I actually did that. But my mother's sentence outlived the diploma. It followed me through the classroom where I taught, into the principal's office once I became one, and into every office where I later coached other school leaders. Thirty years of proving I belonged instead of thirty years of just knowing it.
Your child hears the fear in your voice before they ever hear the love behind it. Say what you mean to them, not about them. And if you have to bring it up in front of someone else, a teacher, a coach, anyone, remember your child is standing right there, hearing exactly how much you believe in them.
I’m finishing a book about moments like this one, called “I Was Your Black Child.” The subtitle says exactly what it’s for, what white parents raising Black children need to hear before it’s too late, and it’s coming soon.
I never once heard my mother say she believed in me. What came instead was the doubt, spoken out loud, in front of somebody else. It took me years to believe the thing she never said, that behind all that worry was a woman who loved me enough to be scared for my future.
Your child is listening to how you talk about them, not just what you say to them. What are they going to believe about themselves because of the things they’ve already heard you say?