No magic words will cure racism that festers in America

LZ Granderson, Tribune News Service

Martin Luther King III and his wife, Andrea Waters King, were in Georgia when they learned about the July death of Nolan Wells, who authorities in Mississippi said drowned even though no water was found in his throat, lungs or stomach. "We were getting our daughter prepared for college when he died," Waters King said about Wells. "The news just hit in the pit of your stomach." Wells graduated from high school in 2025 and had just finished his freshman year at a community college about an hour south of Jackson, the state's capital. "For me, the mother ... just really reflecting on her tears, her anguish. It just really struck a chord for me, given the history of Mississippi."

King, the son of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., said the appearance of a laissez faire attitude from authorities regarding the recent deaths of children is chilling — not only Wells but also year-old Kohen Wiley, who was killed in a police shooting in June in Mississippi. Authorities there recently deemed the use of force justified, although the context was an accusation that someone in the car with him had stolen diapers.

"We see these incidents where Black people are being hung from trees — and we know Black people don't hang themselves — and then, Mississippi. It makes you wonder what in the heck is wrong with our society? This is not only about Black people, Black children — these are all our children."

He was echoing the words of James Baldwin, who in the days leading up to the 1980 general election wrote in the Nation: "The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognising this may be incapable of morality." King and Baldwin are, of course, right about that. "The community needs answers, and this is true no matter the child," King said. "Where is our humanity if Nolan's death goes unanswered? Who are you if the death of a 1-year-old did not strike some type of blow to your heart? That brings us to the next question: If it keeps happening like this, particularly in the South, what do you say to the children?"

In many ways it doesn't matter what we, as a society, say. The reason the racism that began the story of America continues to be written into its passages is that children follow what we do, not what we say. Not what we read on Sundays or write into legislation at the Capitol. Children do what they see the adults in their ecosystem do. If we want a more perfect union, we must push for that, individually, in our everyday actions. It's not rocket science. It's just compassion — though at times it feels as if it would be easier to learn rocket science.

"I think back to the fact that Martin Luther King Jr.'s mother had to pull him aside and tell him that you are just as good as anyone else," Waters King said. "Unfortunately, the conversations in 2026 that we were having with our children are the ones Black parents had in 1926.

"But I also would remind families, and particularly children of the South, that the civil rights movement came out of the South. Black children need to know and understand their history and understand as brutal as that history has been, it has also been beautiful. We are very strong, magnificent, noble people. We are the cradle and the backbone of democracy. The children of the South need to see more from adults in the South."

The title of the 1962 book "The Other America: Poverty in the United States" doesn't scream best seller, but it reached the desk of President Kennedy and was part of the scaffolding President Johnson used to build his "Great Society" policies. It became one of the most influential books in recent American history. It also shared a thesis with one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speeches.

"There are literally two Americas," he said at Stanford University in 1967, less than a year before his assassination. "One America is beautiful ... overflowing with the milk of prosperity ... but tragically and unfortunately there is another America, and this other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In a sense the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children."

Of course, everyone knew we weren't an egalitarian society before that book. What "The Other America" did was provide a vocabulary to understand and discuss the race-driven disparity, so that the bourgeoisie would have a more comfortable way to talk about racism. Much in the way I just used the word "bourgeoisie" to make white people comfortable. Translating stark talk of racism into generalities might have made policy-making more achievable, but it also ensured the solutions would be inadequate to the real problems that remained unnamed. Generally speaking, I don't have a problem with euphemisms, but far too often softening of words leads to softening of actions. Sometimes inaction. And children don't always follow what we say, but they almost always follow what we do.