Recently on Facebook, a friend (who is an actual friend, not a virtual one) posted about listing ten books that affected you in some way. Although I didn’t answer the post, I started thinking about the question. I read Darren Bell’s The Talk, and it left a lasting impression on me.
Darren Bell is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. He told his story succinctly in a graphic novel style about ‘the talk’ his white mother had with him when he was six. She said he couldn’t have a popular toy, a realistic-looking water pistol; it would create problems for him. Confused, as any 6-year-old would be, he didn’t understand what she meant. However, as his life changed, he began experiencing racial profiling of young black males, first as a child, only a few years older, and then as a talented, hardworking young black man. Those experiences changed his life and the choices he would make.
Bell now understands what his mother feared. He is facing the same dilemma as his mother did years ago---should he now have the same talk with his young 6-year-old?
I was mesmerized by the book. Not only did I enjoy how he told his story through his cartooning, but I was captivated by his empathy and his disdain for any form of discrimination.
As a child growing up in rural West Virginia in the late 1950s and 1960s, I witnessed discrimination by reading the newspapers and watching the evening news. I saw Dr. King being arrested but going to jail peacefully. I watched and read about the Freedom Riders, the killings in the South, and the crowds during the March on Washington. I read about four black girls who were killed in a church bombing. I witnessed the signing of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s and the hope it would change our world. I witnessed discrimination when a teaching friend was threatened because she was a black woman.
Yet, 60+ years later, the discrimination continues, simply based on the color of your skin, your faith, your sexuality, or your ethnicity.
What have we learned over the decades?
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Bell earned many awards and honors for The Talk. It is shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 2024.
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