The Talk 2.0: A Bedtime Lesson for My Daughter

On words, worth, and what it takes to raise a Black child who knows her power.

I didn’t know where the words came from. But there they were—and once I said them, I understood how serious I was, how serious I meant them.

My daughter was lying on the top bunk in our home-away-from-home. It has become the place we go to feel restored by the ocean air and the quiet community’s invitation to stillness. Outside her bedroom window, the sprawling oak swayed in the blue-black dark, and slate clouds shaped like thought bubbles scampered across the sky. Earlier that day, she’d said something about herself—something cruel, something she must have heard somewhere and decided to repeat. I hadn’t reacted then, but the words stayed with me, humming.

So before bed I told her what I believe with my whole heart:

“The words we put out into the universe shape our reality. They are not just sound; they are matter. Don’t speak harm over yourself. The world will try hard enough to do that for you.”

She looked down from the bunk, blanket to her chin, bright, blinking eyes searching. And in that moment, I realized we need to update the talk.

In the years after the murder of Trayvon Martin, and later, after the slaying of George Floyd and Brionna Taylor, “the talk” entered the wider public imagination. People who had never heard it spoken about before began to glimpse that Black parents have long carried the obligation to prepare our children for the dangers of being seen. Every family, I suspect, has its own version of a talk—immigrant families, working-class families, families marked by faith or exile or struggle. But within the broad and layered constellation we call the Black community, this talk has a particular shape. It’s the one that teaches our children how to survive encounters that can turn deadly; how to navigate a world where the presumption of innocence does not automatically apply to us. And now, in this moment, I find myself, realizing that talk it isn’t enough anymore.

We need The Talk 2.0.

And we need it to be about what it means to be a carrier of light in a culture built to dim it, in a culture that prefers darkness to us shining a light forward for everyone, even those who wish harm upon us. About how what we think, what we say, and what we believe doesn’t just reflect the world; it builds the world.

The talk I gave her that night was about her assignment. About being needed. About the fight that didn’t begin with us and, evidently, won’t end with us.

The words came through me because I was already carrying too much.

Earlier in the evening, I’d been absorbing the headlines about the indictment of Letitia James for daring to hold power accountable. The lies, the mockery, the open contempt—it was all there. And I felt that familiar burn rise up in my chest: fury, disbelief, a deep grief for what this country still does to Black women who refuse to bow.

Because it’s not just her. It’s Lisa Cook, being targeted for doing her job. It’s Kamala Harris, being openly derided as “empty” even by liberals in liberal media outlets, to score clever points among their readers who mistake cynicism for insight. It’s Fawn Weaver, watching the company she built—a beacon of Black excellence—be stripped from her and placed under the control of a white man who may well be qualified for the job but is, unavoidably, positioned as her overseer.

Different arenas. Same script. The message is clear: Black women who stand fully in their authority can be publicly punished for it, while the very forces that rebuke them insist race and gender have nothing to do with it.

Let’s be on the level with one another: we’ve seen it before. The machinery of backlash finds new language, new laws, new headlines to do the same old work. An administration that cloaks white grievance in the costume of law and order; a culture that cannot abide Black agency without needing to humble it.

The other side of this malignant machinery is the protection of white men at all costs. The system that disciplines Black women for their power is the same one that shields white men from the consequences of their cruelty. They are twinned acts: punishment and protection, carried out in the name of order.

And part of how they pull it off is by pretending—no, insisting—racism no longer exists. You can always tell what a country fears most by what it denies most. The louder the insistence that “race has nothing to do with it,” the surer you can be that it does. That’s how denial becomes doctrine. That’s how a system protects itself while insisting it’s colorblind.

Watching J.D. Vance lately, you can see the other side of the performance taking shape: his rabid defense of Charlie Kirk; his apology tour for a group of young white men whose racist and misogynistic group chats have been exposed. It’s all part of a project to reassure the next generation of unmoored young men—still suspicious of his manicured beard, still unsure whether his jawline is sufficiently chiseled for the myth they’re building—that they will be protected, that no matter what they say or do, someone with power will stand over them and call it courage. They dress it up as stewardship, as mentorship, as care for the future—but the protection serves a poisonous end. It isn’t about helping them grow into better men; it’s about hardening them into loyal soldiers.

I think about my daughter when I ingest all of this bile. She’s growing up in a country where the rule of law may soon look nothing like what we were raised to believe it was. Where voting rights are poised to be narrowed even further. Where discrimination will no longer be something you can prove by its impact—only by proving intent, which, under the doctrine of denial that MAGA breathes and breeds, will surface only when they imagine themselves the victims. She will have to learn to see through the language—how words like freedom, merit, and equality are being turned inside out.

The world they’re building makes race unnameable and unspeakable, precisely so it can no longer be held accountable for racial harm. My daughter will inherit that world, and she will need to know how to recognize the way power hides itself behind civility, the way cruelty rebrands itself as debate, the way the persecutor insists on his victimhood.

I needed my daughter to know that the struggle isn’t abstract. It’s alive. It’s happening right now. And she, too, will one day be called to stand in that fire—and to meet it with light.

Once, someone whispered something to each of those women, maybe at bedtime, maybe in a mirror: You are a gift, and you have gifts that we will need if we are to continue our march forward. You are needed.

That’s what I whispered to my daughter.

Because the words we choose become the worlds we inhabit. And I want her world to be one spoken into being with love, courage, and belief in her own power.

I whispered to her that she is the link in a chain that stretches through centuries—through women and men who endured the impossible and still built beauty. Through ancestors who held the line when the world tried to break them. Through those who fought, sang, wept, prayed, and dreamed her into existence.

And then, at a certain point, I told her she needed to be ready. She asked, “Ready for what?”

I realized that I had said too much and not enough—realized that the bass in my voice was too weighted with all the ghosts I’ve inherited, all the lessons I swore I’d deliver differently.

I paused. I reeled myself back in.

“You’ll know when it’s time,” I said. “For now, be a child.”

I could hear myself sounding like a father reaching for reassurance he didn’t fully believe, retreating into the role because it was the only comfort he could offer. A line spoken as much to steady myself as to soothe her.

We ended our talk with her face soft in the glow of moonlight, mine reflected in the stillness of her gaze.

And I thought about all the parents before me who must have said some version of those same words, hoping their children would live long enough to become who they were meant to be.

Because the fight for freedom never really ends. It just changes hands.