In which a 47-year-old white man gets The Talk

“…But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible — this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Warning: white fragility ahead

I’m a 56-year-old white man, living in New York City, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. I’m married to a Bajan-American woman. We have two biracial boys, currently 16 and 18 years of age. We have been in our current neighborhood since 2000. I was an actor in my youth, and in 2008, I got a little bit of an itch to find out if I was still any good (the answer is no). So I signed up to take some acting classes at the Harlem School of the Arts.

In 2009, there were 581,168 stop and frisks in NYC, almost entirely targeted at people of color. Mostly kids, really. Kids in some neighborhoods were getting stopped like 5 times a year. Each. The number of stops would peak at almost 700,00 in 2011. My boys were 8 and 9 at the time, respectively. I had gotten to know the other students in the class, and they were fun and accepting of me, even though I was the only white person in the class. (This wasn’t surprising to me — I was a little vain about…