To the Coming of a Better Time

A Golden Age in Black Culture and Consciousness

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

They say the most important age for how one grows to see and understand the world is the age of eight. At the age of eight, I was the only black kid in my desegregated public school class in Chesterfield County, Virginia. My daughter at the age of eight attended a private school in sunny San Diego with a Harvard Law School alumnus Dad and a Yale alumna Mom. My Dad at the age of eight was attending segregated all-black Hickory Hill Elementary School in 1942 with a deceased butler father and a grieving widowed mom.

These three generations in time in our Twyman family came together at the family church this January for my sister’s funeral. Consider how distant my Dad’s memories and life experiences are from my daughter’s memories and experiences. My Dad has never traveled on an airplane. My daughter has traveled throughout North America and Europe innumerable times.

When my daughter says “blackness is about oppression and nothing else matters,” those words do not ring true to me. Because vision and deferred gratification and ambition and self-confidence and intelligence mattered for her parents, my daughter has the luxury of perceiving the world as oppression writ large. She is of a certain age, as am I, as is my Dad.

One can’t really understand a black family unless one understands the importance of generational experience and personality. As I read essays and articles and books on race, I never sense a sophisticated perception of profound different generational experiences, save for Unlearning Race: Self Portrait in Black and White by Thomas Chatteron Williams. Robin J. DiAngelo of White Fragility fame offers nothing relevant to the pulse of generational introspection within black families. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me doesn’t see me and my family spanning eighty-five years of generational triggering events. In his blindness to generational personalities, Coates’ ruminations about indefinite structural racism and suffocating white supremacy are probably wrong for how my family perceives the world and one another. Between the World and Me is alien to Twyman Road where I grew up and a southern suburban coming of age in the Age of Civil Rights, let alone a southern California ethos in the…

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