A Letter to My Children About Ending Racism

5 Things You Need to Know to Change the World

Dear Oliver, Clara, and Maisy –

I woke up this morning with tears in my eyes and an old Yusuf/Cat Stevens song in my head called Father and Son. It used to make me cry even when I listened to it as a kid, but I looked it up this morning and the lyrics seemed incredibly apt to where we’re at right now as a culture and perhaps even as a family.

Funnily enough, I identify with both the father and the son in the song. Like the father, I want you to be able to enjoy the simple pleasures of a life well-lived without taking on the suffering of the world as your own; like the son, I want you to follow your inner knowing wherever it may take you and to oppose injustice wherever you find it.

Over the past couple of weeks, you’ve been my primary education portal to articles and videos about what’s really behind the Black Lives Matter movement — a deliberate systemic racism that began hundreds of years before Michael Brown lost his life in a police shooting on the streets of Ferguson in 2014 or George Floyd lost his under the knee of a policeman on the streets of Minneapolis.

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

The voice inside my head had much to say in defense of the underlying goodness in people and the complexity of issues that defy…