Introduction: A Challenger Approaches
Near the end of Marvel's Black Panther, T'Challa stands before a sleek Wakandan spacecraft that has just landed in a public park in Oakland, California, the very neighborhood where his father once met with a radical he refused to claim as kin. Children surround the vessel, eyes wide, mouths open. A young boy steps forward and asks T'Challa, "Who are you?" The king smiles and replies, "I am someone who is here to help." That scene, brief as it is, has haunted me for years. It is not simply a cinematic flourish. It is a theology of presence, the idea that the most powerful thing a person can do for a young man who has never seen someone who looks like him standing in power is to simply show up. I have been trying to show up for over a decade, mentoring in spaces across Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Vancouver, BC; and Houston. The young men I meet are talented, technically fluent, and quietly suffocating under the weight of something they often cannot name.
The Weight of a Mirror: Internalized Self-Hatred
Recently, I sat with a young man, let us call him Dev, who is enrolled in a computer science program and can discuss machine learning architectures with the fluency most adults reserve for the weather. He is, by any conventional measure, exceptional. He is also biracial, the son of a Black father he has never known and a white mother who raised him in a predominantly white suburb north of Seattle. Over the course of several weeks, Dev began sharing things that frightened me, not because they were unfamiliar, but because they were so precise. He felt uneasy about the darkness of his own skin. He described code-switching not as a professional survival skill but as a kind of self-erasure he performs constantly. He used the phrase "people like me" with a disgust I recognized as self-directed. He spoke about colorism, the preference within Black communities for lighter skin, as something that had been used against him and that he had also turned against himself. What I was watching was not a crisis of confidence. It was something older and more structural: the performance of self-hatred as a rational response to an environment that has consistently told him his Blackness is a liability and his whiteness an apology. He is also, in his own words, fascinated by me, a childless Black man whom he described as the first Black man to ever show him kindness. That stopped me cold. In twenty years of being raised in Seattle, not one Black man had shown this young person basic human warmth. That says something not only about his isolation but about how far our reach as a community still needs to extend.
What We Have Built: The Record of Black Achievement
To mentor a young Black man effectively, one must be able to hold the weight of his pain in one hand and the magnitude of his inheritance in the other. And that inheritance, over just the past two decades, is staggering. In 2001, Robert Johnson became the first Black billionaire in American history when he sold BET Networks to Viacom for approximately three billion dollars. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Hussein Obama, a man of color whose full complexity we will return to in a later conversation, won the presidency of the United States twice, carrying not only electoral majorities but the symbolic force of an entire civilization's aspirations. In science and medicine, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a Black immunologist, played a central role in developing the mRNA technology underlying the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, a breakthrough estimated to have saved millions of lives globally. In arts and culture, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been awarded to Black playwrights August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage, who received it twice. Kehinde Wiley painted the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama, the first Black artist ever commissioned to do so. In technology, founders such as Tristan Walker of Walker and Company have begun, slowly but meaningfully, to shift the face of American entrepreneurship. These are not exceptions. These are data points in a pattern of excellence that stretches back centuries and accelerates forward.
The Shoulders We Stand On
The record does not begin in 2000. It begins with people who had far less and built far more. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the Hidden Figures of NASA, performed orbital calculations by hand during the Space Race at a time when they were legally barred from using the same bathrooms as their white colleagues. Thurgood Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and later became the first Black Supreme Court Justice. Dr. Charles Drew developed the blood bank system that saved millions of Allied soldiers during World War II, despite being excluded from the very segregated Red Cross donation system he helped create. In the twenty-first century, that lineage continues with Simone Biles, who has redefined what the human body is capable of in competitive gymnastics, and with Stacey Abrams, who built a grassroots voter registration movement in Georgia that changed the composition of the United States Senate. It continues with the thousands of Black scientists, engineers, educators, artists, and entrepreneurs whose names never make headlines but whose contributions make the infrastructure of modern life function. When I sit with Dev and watch him doubt himself, I am not watching a young man who comes from nothing. I am watching a young man who has been cut off from everything.
A Pacific Northwest Particularity: The Biracial Experience in the Rain
There is something particular happening in the Pacific Northwest that I have come to think of as a specific geography of identity loss. Portland and Seattle are among the whitest major cities in the United States, a legacy of explicit racial exclusion policies. Oregon's original state constitution literally barred Black people from settling within its borders. Into this landscape, over the past three decades, have come a significant number of interracial relationships, many of them between Black men and white women. The children of these relationships, particularly those who were not raised by or in proximity to their Black fathers, are navigating racial identity formation in near-total institutional isolation. They grow up in neighborhoods and school systems where Blackness is often abstract, mediated through music and media rather than through grandmothers, barbershops, family reunion tables, and the tactile inheritance of community. They may hear about racism secondhand from white relatives who frame it as something that happened elsewhere, long ago. They arrive at college having never been told, clearly and credibly, that they are good, that they come from greatness, and that their confusion is not weakness. It is the predictable result of a system that was designed to produce exactly this kind of fracture.
The Echo of Absence: Fatherlessness, PTSS, and the Long Shadow
Dr. Joy DeGruy's concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, or PTSS, offers one framework for understanding the multigenerational transmission of trauma within Black communities. PTSS holds that centuries of institutionalized dehumanization, including chattel slavery, followed by Reconstruction's violent reversal, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and sustained economic exclusion, have produced adaptive survival behaviors that, stripped of their original context, can manifest as self-destructive patterns including diminished self-worth, internalized racism, and the disruption of bonding and family formation. When a young Black man grows up without his father, that absence does not happen in a vacuum. It happens inside a history that systematically attacked Black fatherhood through the Middle Passage's destruction of kinship ties, through slavery's legal prohibition on Black marriage, through the war on drugs' targeted incarceration of Black men, and through a hundred policy mechanisms designed, explicitly or effectively, to separate Black men from their children. Understanding this context does not excuse abandonment. It contextualizes it, and it places responsibility not only on individuals but on the systems that shaped them. I am saying this as a black man, son of a preacher man who did not raise him as well… I get it.
Accountability Without Amnesty: The 2013 CDC Report and the Standard We Must Hold
Here I must be direct about something that complicates the role I am trying to play. The pain Dev carries is real. The history that produced it is real. And the narrative that Black fathers are uniquely absent is, largely, a lie. A 2013 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Black fathers who live with their children are actually more involved in their children's daily lives, including feeding, bathing, reading, playing, and helping with homework, than white or Hispanic fathers in comparable living situations. The data does not support the stereotype. What the data does support is that Black fathers are disproportionately separated from their children by incarceration, poverty, and structural barriers, not by indifference. It is worth noting that this report has not been formally replicated or updated in over thirteen years, a gap that itself reflects the low institutional priority placed on affirming Black fatherhood in American public health research. The core findings, however, remain consistent with subsequent sociological literature, which continues to show that Black fathers who are present are deeply engaged parents. The absence of an updated federal study does not weaken the original conclusion. It simply leaves an important truth underserved. And yet, in the specific cases I have encountered over the past several years in Portland and Seattle, I have also sat with young men whose fathers were accessible, were not incarcerated, were not impoverished, and still were not present. PTSS offers insight, but it cannot offer absolution. At some point, knowing the history of the wound must coexist with the individual's responsibility to refuse to pass it forward. We cannot simultaneously celebrate the achievements described in these pages and excuse the abandonment of children. Excellence and accountability are not opposites. They are the same demand.
The Obama Question: What a President Could and Could Not Do
Many of the young men I work with were in elementary school during Barack Obama's presidency. I had hoped, perhaps naively, that this would matter in a specific way, that a Black man governing the most powerful nation on earth would function as a kind of ambient permission structure, a constant signal that Black excellence was not anomalous. I remember being a child during the Reagan and Bush administrations, watching faces on television that looked nothing like mine and simply accepting that as the nature of power. I did not have the critical vocabulary then to understand what that normalization was doing to my imagination. I assumed that a Black president might disrupt that normalization for a generation of young Black boys. What I have found instead is more complicated. Obama was present on screen, but for a biracial child being raised in a white household in a predominantly white city, his presence was often filtered through white frameworks, celebrated as post-racial, held up as proof that structural racism had been solved, and occasionally weaponized in the form of the argument that if Obama could do it, no one had an excuse. The message received was not always the message intended. A symbol requires a community to interpret it. Without Black family, Black mentors, Black institutions, and Black cultural context, even the presidency of Barack Obama can be experienced as an abstraction, impressive and distant, somehow beside the point of the specific loneliness a young man feels when he looks in the mirror and does not like what he sees.
Showing Up at the Ship: What Mentorship Actually Requires
I return, finally, to T'Challa standing by the spaceship. What strikes me now, rewatching that scene, is not the technology of Wakanda or the symbolism of Oakland. It is the simplicity of the act: he came. He showed up in a place where children had never seen anything like him, and he made himself available. That is, stripped of all its metaphor, what mentorship requires. When I sit with Dev, I am not trying to fix him. I am trying to be a sustained, honest, and warm presence that contradicts the story he has been told about himself. I bring him the CDC data, the story of Katherine Johnson, the box office records of Black Panther, and the name of Kizzmekia Corbett. I challenge him when he performs self-hatred because I refuse to let him practice it unchallenged. I also tell him the truth about Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, not as an excuse for his father's absence but as a history that belongs to him, one that explains something about the wound without justifying it. I tell him that his technical intelligence is not despite his Blackness but continuous with a tradition of Black innovation that built this country and is building the next one. And I tell him what T'Challa told that child in Oakland: that someone is here to help. That is not nothing. In a life where too many people have been absent, that is almost everything.
