There's a familiar promise embedded in my head: You can become anything.
Parents, teachers, pastors, graduation speakers, and even melodically-gifted Sesame Street muppet characters repeated that promise to me when I was a child. But as a Black kid growing up in Oklahoma, I'd also hear another refrain, one that rebuffed "proper English": We can't have nothing. I knew I'd spend my life balancing the promise of endless possibility for personal achievement with the reality that Black folk in America can't seem to have anything — or at least, we can't have anything permanently.
My parents and grandparents came to America in the 1960s and '70s from Jamaica. By almost every measure, my parents have achieved the American Dream. My dad and mom, though they did not receive their college degrees until well into their 40s, have established themselves in their careers. My dad climbed rung after slippery rung to high levels of management in a company he has spent his life helping. And my mom is a nurse with nearly 30 years of experience. They forged their own paths in this country, moving far from the excitement of New York for the enduringly flat and predictable state of Oklahoma. They bought a home in which to raise their three kids. They did everything in their power to ensure their own children had access to opportunity.
And in many ways, it worked. All of us went to college. I went to grad school — twice — and picked up three degrees from institutions that made me look around wondering how I got there and if I was good enough to stay because so few of my fellow students looked like me.
One sibling, who finished college two years ago, is working actively in criminal justice reform and is considering law school. He actually has the time to take a break from college, which he attended on a full-ride scholarship, to work on changing the world, or at least a piece of it, before going to what will likely be a highly-ranked law school. My other sibling is still in school but studying for the GRE to prepare for a Ph.D., or perhaps a Master's degree, or perhaps time doing work elsewhere. But she has that thing that my grandparents immigrated here to achieve: optionality. My siblings each have a choice in their own destinies — or at least I hope they do.
Jacob Blake likely thought that all the struggle and mire his ancestors and their counterparts endured gave him that same privilege. His grandparents, like my own, had survived far too much racism for their children to become anything but exactly what they desired. According to Blake's dad, "My father was there for the first march in Washington. He went through Selma to Montgomery. He went across the Edmund Pettus. He marched for open housing in Evanston, Illinois."
