January 12, 2026

Dear Kameron,

Three days ago, you turned 9 years old, full of the vibrant energy and intellectual curiosity I so adore. Today, I am 61, a number that grants me the perspective of a witness. I was born on this date in 1965, five weeks before Malcolm X was killed, three years before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a child when Fred Hampton was murdered. You are now the age I was when the 1970s dawned, a decade that promised much and retreated from even more.

I write this to you not just as your grandfather, but as a Black man who has had the profound privilege you may never know: I sat with my grandfathers, and even my great-grandfathers. These men lived under American apartheid—Jim Crow. I heard their stories, but only the ones they chose to tell. I never knew, truly knew, how their hearts broke when they saw the photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized body, or what silent fury coiled inside them when news came of four little girls blown apart in a Birmingham church. Their inner worlds, their perceptions of the abhorrent conditions they endured, are lost to me. I cannot ask them. That loss is a specific kind of grief.

So I write to you now, for the day you turn 61 and I am long gone. I write so you will know, without question, how your grandfather saw this moment of drastic and unnerving upheaval in the age of Trump, and so you will understand the single most important task before your generation: the curation and dissemination of our counter-narratives.

The American Creed: A Doctrine of Contradiction

First, you must understand the bedrock truth: racism and white supremacy are not an aberration in America; they are part of the American Creed. This nation was conceived in a fatal contradiction—liberty alongside bondage, freedom alongside a race-based caste system. That contradiction was not an accident; it was a design feature. The “MAGA”movement you hear about is not a novel phenomenon. It is the latest, most overt embrace of this original tradition. It seeks not to make America great again, but to make America’s racial hierarchy explicit again. They understand a fundamental principle: he who controls the past controls the future. This is why their most relentless campaign is against memory itself.

The War on Memory and Why It Targets You

Kameron, the fierce movement to ban so-called “critical race theory” from classrooms is not about a complex academic framework. It is an attempt to erase the brutal and inhumane history that is your inheritance. It is a drive to sanitize the past, to turn the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the savagery of the Middle Passage, the terrorism of lynching, and the systemic cruelty of Jim Crow into vague “mistakes” or, worse, omit them entirely.

The simultaneous attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is the policy arm of this erasure. It is an effort to firmly re-entrench that caste system, to dismantle the meager tools created to ensure people like you might have a fighting chance in institutions built to exclude us. They are selling a revisionist history of a pure, virtuous nation, and any fact that complicates that fiction must be destroyed.

You are living through what historians will recognize as the Second Great White Backlash. The first came after Reconstruction (1865-1877), when the fleeting promise of multiracial democracy was drowned in a wave of lynching, Black codes, and the establishment of Jim Crow. We are now witnessing the furious response to the cultural and political progress symbolized by the Civil Rights Movement and, more potently, by the presidency of Barack Obama.

A Legacy of Strategizing Against the Scourge

Do not believe for a moment that our people have been passive in the face of this centuries-old scourge. Your bloodline is one of strategists. We have debated the path in cotton fields, barbershops, churches, dorm rooms, song lyrics and kitchens for generations.

Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner saw rebellion as the only solution.

Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey determined emigration was the only route to dignity.

Booker T. Washington argued for accommodation and economic advancement, setting politics aside.

Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X preached separation from the “white devil.”

Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and a legion of others staked their lives on nonviolent, moral protest.

These were all responses to the same core antagonism: a nation that vowed liberty yet practiced bondage. The MAGA movement seeks to eliminate the very possibility that you, Kameron, will understand this long, strategic conversation. They want you ignorant of your own intellectual and resistant heritage.

The Battle for the Narrative: Why Civil Society Must Be Our Fortress

This brings me to my urgent plea. The mainstream avenues of information are failing or have been co-opted. Legacy media is consolidated and often sympathetic to the forces of revisionism. Billionaire tech overlords control the algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok—opaque systems that can amplify lies and bury truth with a tweak of code. You cannot rely on them to tell your story.

Therefore, enlightened Blacks and people of color must become relentless curators and disseminators of counter-narratives. This letter is a small act of that curation. We must build and fortify our own institutions of memory and truth-telling.

The Black church must be more than a place of Sunday worship; it must be a sanctuary for our historical truth.
Our fraternities and sororities must pass down not just rituals, but the unvarnished chronicle of our struggle.
Our barbershops and beauty salons must remain seminaries of street-level scholarship.
Our historians, artists, filmmakers, and writers must be supported, celebrated, and protected.
Our family dinners must become spaces where we explicitly connect the past to the present.


We must create our own archives, our own film series, our own book clubs, our own social media networks. We must document, document, document. We must tell our stories to our children with the complexity and courage they deserve.

My Charge to You

Kameron, when you read this at 61, you will have lived through the flowering of this second backlash. I do not know what America you will see. But I need you to know what I saw, and what I feared.
I feared a nation that chooses amnesia over atonement. I feared a system that would try to make you a stranger to your own history. But I also have hope, because I see you. I see your brilliance.
My deepest wish is that this letter finds you as a man who has taken up this sacred work. That you have been a curator of truth for your children and your community. That you understood your grandfather’s perception not as a burden, but as a blueprint. The American experiment’s fatal contradiction remains unresolved. Your generation will not complete the work, but you must advance it.
The only way forward is to hold, protect, and loudly proclaim our counter-narrative. It is the story of our survival, our analysis, our sorrow, our joy, and our unwavering demand for a humanity this country has too often denied. It is the story I pass to you.

Keep it. Add to it. And pass it on.
With all my love and faith in you,

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