Streeter: It’s difficult to raise a cool, hard Baltimore kid, knowing it’ll be held against him

Last week, my nearly 13-year-old son wanted to snap a photo of himself holding a fanned array of dollar bills I’d taken out when changing wallets. He thought it would look cool for his group chat. I’m sorry — do they still say “cool”? I’m so old.

I told him no, because A: It was not his money; B: His friends aren’t the Capital One guy and don’t need to know what’s in my wallet; C: I was afraid that someday, if he was ever either famous or infamous, the picture would be used to discredit him or make him, possibly, the villain in his own victimhood.

Therein lies the balancing act of being in predominantly Black Baltimore and raising an urban kid whose natural inclination is to hew to those postures: the bling, the paper, the dirt bikes and the so-called street-smart identity.

I chose to live here because I wanted him to see himself in his city, to not be an other, and to explore whoever he wanted to be.

“I find Baltimore the best place for children to grow up,” said lifelong Baltimorean Bruce McKinley Williams, who is Black and raised his six kids, including five sons, in the city.

I agree in part because I love the demographics of this majority-Black city. I want my son to know that being identifiably and proudly Black in all of the ways is a good thing. I also want him to be prepared for the fact that not everyone is going to think so.

“I told my kids ‘the Black man is an endangered species’ as a warning to look out for yourself,” said Williams, who grew up in the original Perkins Homes projects in Southeast Baltimore. “No matter where you go, even in your own neighborhood, people are detrimental to your health.”

Kids don’t even have to be in urban areas to be judged like that. Consider the onslaught of headlines claiming that Nolan Wells, the Black rising college football player found dead off a Mississippi barrier island, was drinking heavily while underage before his death, even amid photos of his white friends of the same age holding beers. The news media want to imply that the circumstances surrounding Nolan’s death are his own fault.

Look at the way that the most-used photo of murdered child Trayvon Martin was an unsmiling close-up in a hoodie, an attempt to make him look threatening and older, as if to say, “See, this is why he deserved to be killed.” But last week, when a truly monstrous white man lost his corporate job and killed his entire family and himself, all the photos were of him smiling warmly with his victims.

A dead Black child gets portrayed as a probable villain, and a white murderer gets to look like a saint. This is the world I am raising my son in.

You can’t educate or dress your way out of that truth or out of stereotypes. I was raised in an era of respectability politics: Don’t wear your nails long, or certain hairstyles, or you’ll look “ghetto.” The recent ban on bonnets and durags at prestigious HBCU Tuskegee University plays along with those politics, and as a recovering critic of such looks who now minds her own business, I think it’s silly.

Williams, whose children and nephews went on to be everything from plumbers to police officers, said he balanced the influence of the streets with having “a mother who kept us in church.”

His spirituality was leavened with a dose of street smarts he learned from childhood. “You have to be aware of your surroundings. One of the good things about my father was his statement to me, ‘If you walk into a room, and something doesn’t seem right, it’s not,’” he said.

That is absolutely the kind of lesson I give my son. “Head on a swivel,” I always say when he leaves the house on his skateboard. I am aware that this advice is helpful in Baltimore, but he would be Black and male and young anywhere. There’s safety in numbers, and in reality.

On a bike ride a few weeks ago, my son asked me what I thought he’d be like if we had not moved from a mostly white upper-middle-class Florida neighborhood back to a more racially and economically diverse urban area in Baltimore.

I said I thought that he’d still basically be him, but that his identity as a Black kid would not be the same if he had gone to mostly white schools in a culture that was rooted in money and increasingly MAGA, which was part of the impetus for the relocation.

It’s possible to live in Baltimore, hang out with friends with creative nicknames and still go on to success, like Williams, who became an engineer. I’m trying to raise a friendly, well-connected, confident Black child who is solid in any identity he comes to have without that being used against him. But I’m afraid it will be.

Is it fair that I have to give my kid lessons other parents don’t? No. Am I going to keep doing that while encouraging him to be himself? Sure. I don’t even care if he does it in a durag.