Don’t Call Him a Man: There’s No Winning When You’re a Black Child
Yesterday, I finally had the mental bandwidth to sit down and read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s New York Times essay about the decisions she and her husband made to educate their Black daughter, Najya, in predominantly Black schools.
Later in the day, I watched Christine Wells-Wonsley, Nolan Wells’s mother, speak after a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict anyone in connection with her 18-year-old son’s death. The grand jury found no credible evidence of criminal conduct and said the circumstances were consistent with drowning, yet both the state medical examiner and the independent pathologist hired by his family left the cause and manner of death undetermined. For Nolan’s family, the decision has created even more questions about his tragic death.
As I watched, I sobbed inconsolably with her as she implored NBC News’ Yasmine Vossoughi to “please stop referring to him as a man because he was a teenager. He was 18 when he left this earth.”
Both of these stories hit the zeitgeist this week and struck me deep to my core in ways I could not have predicted, not because Najya and Nolan experienced the same thing, but because I can locate my own childhood and humanity so intimately inside both of theirs.
I hear myself in Najya, a Black child whose parents made a life-altering decision about where she should be educated because they believed they were doing what was best for her. My parents made a different decision for me, but I know what it feels like to be the child living inside an adult calculation about education, school integration, opportunity, and what kind of future might be possible for their child.
And then there is Nolan. When I look at him, a beautiful Black boy who spent so much of his life in proximity to white boys, I see the boy I was, the friendships I had, the places I wanted to go, and all those years when I could not understand why my mother worried so much or why her answer was so often no. His tragic and mysterious death has been harder for me to process because I know how easily, under different circumstances, I could have been Nolan Wells.
These stories of Najya and Nolan each bring me back to the experience of being a Black child whose parents are trying to make impossible decisions inside systems they did not create and cannot fully control. Whether the question is where to send your child to school, how much freedom to give them, what dangers to warn them about, or how tightly to hold on, Black parents are so often making choices with the knowledge that racism will still affect their children regardless of their efforts to protect them from it. And the child is bearing the weight of these fears, calculations, and decisions whether they want to or not.
No Winning As a Black Child
I know what it is to be a Black boy surrounded by white boys. That is why both stories have brought me back to something I learned long before I had the language to articulate it.
There’s no winning as a Black child.
There’s no winning as a Black mother.
As a Black child, almost as a birthright, you are tasked with carrying the weight of your ancestors, the weight of the Black collective, the weight of your family, the weight of racism not only from birth but in utero.
Every decision made for you is weighed against all the decisions that came before you.
The world seeing you as older than your biological years.
The different standard that you will undoubtedly be measured against.
Called loud and aggressive when you’re bold and extroverted.
Called suspicious when you’re reserved and introverted.
The school-to-prison pipeline that your Black mother so desperately wants to avoid placing you in.
The adultification of your Black body as a Black girl.
Being told you are less than when you know you are brilliant.
The touching of your Afro.
The cutting of your Black hair.
Being asked to grow up faster than your white peers, until you inevitably learn at some point as a Black child that your life exists inside something greater than yourself, that you will not always be measured against your own potential and merits, but against the collective.
You learn that being a Black child comes with an inheritance you never asked for.
Najya Was Me
I see myself so clearly in Najya Hannah-Jones because I, too, was a Black child who loved learning and loved being surrounded by other Black children. I was advanced beyond my years, curious, ambitious, and very much at home in my predominantly Black elementary school, Virgil I. Grissom School No. 7. That was my community. My friends were there. My cousin Pierce and I were in the same class. I was surrounded by Black genius before I ever had language for what that meant.
My parents ultimately made a very different choice for me than Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband made for Najya. At the end of fifth grade, they decided that I would leave School No. 7 and enter Rochester’s Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program, which meant being bused nearly 20 miles away from home to attend school in the predominantly white town of Brockport. But like Najya, I was a child being forced to live with a decision adults had made because they believed it was in my best interest. I did not have a voice. I did not get to vote.
What I remember most is how sudden and final it felt. I had spent fifth grade assuming I would come back the next year and finally be one of the sixth graders, the seniors of my elementary school. My cousin and I had plans. There were friendships, crushes, all the little dramas and rituals that make up a child’s world and feel enormous when you are in fifth grade on the cusp of puberty and teenage dreams. Then I learned that I would not be coming back. I received no warning and had no way to mentally or emotionally prepare. Instead, I was going to some far-away school, in a far-away place that I had never heard of, with children I had never met, in a place I did not know. The rug was pulled out from under me. Like Najya, I was left wondering why no one was thinking about me while adults made decisions about me without me.
In 2022, I wrote an essay about what followed and the complicated question of what integration gave me and what it cost. Being educated in Brockport gave me access to resources and opportunities that my parents feared I might not receive otherwise, but access was not the same thing as belonging. I left a school where Blackness was ordinary and entered one where I became acutely aware of being Black. I gained one kind of educational opportunity while losing the ease of being educated in community with children who looked like me and came from where I came from.
Thirty years later, I can understand my parents’ decision in ways my ten-year-old self never could. They were making it within a long history of Black parents being told, explicitly and implicitly, that better schools, better resources, and greater opportunity existed in proximity to whiteness. They believed sending me to a predominantly white school would give me a better chance to thrive. Nikole Hannah-Jones looked at that same history and came to another conclusion for her daughter. She did not want access to a quality education to require separating Najya from Black teachers and other Black children.
That is what makes the public debate and backlash around Hannah-Jones’s essay feel so reductive and painfully familiar to me. People are desperate to decide which mother made the right choice, as though racism had offered either family an easy one to begin with.
Najya stayed in predominantly Black schools and later questioned whether those schools had prepared her academically in the ways she needed. When she eventually chose a more selective high school for herself, she entered a much whiter environment and encountered an entirely different set of problems, including culture shock, racial hostility, and suddenly being one of relatively few Black students in the room.
I know something about that transition because I lived a version of it from the other direction. My parents chose integration for me early, and I spent the years that followed learning what access could look like when it came bundled with isolation, assimilation, and the awareness that I had entered somebody else’s world.
So when Najya tells her mother, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” I do not hear an argument for one kind of school over another. I hear a child asking why she was not given more agency in a decision that would shape so much of her life, why everyone seemed to be thinking about what her education represented while she was the one who had to live it.
Dr. Stacey Patton, in her response to Hannah-Jones’s essay, asks us to sit with Najya rather than immediately turning her experience into another adult argument about segregation, integration, school choice, ideology, or politics. Black children are so often asked to carry things that were never ours to solve: the dreams of our families, the failures of institutions, the unfinished business of history, and the hope that somehow our individual success will prove something about all of us.
I understand now what my parents were trying to give me, and I can be grateful for what I gained without pretending there was no loss. Understanding their decision does not erase what it felt like to be the child who had to live it. Integration gave me access to an education that I had a right to without needing to leave my community to get it. Instead of equity and access, I was forced to leave behind a place where I belonged without having any say in the matter. It would take me years to understand that what I lost was not simply a school, but community, familiarity, and the ease of being a Black child surrounded by other Black children before I understood that such ease was something I could lose.
I Could Have Been Nolan Wells
I see myself in Nolan Wells too, although in a different and more unsettling way. Like Nolan, I spent much of my adolescence in proximity to white boys. I went to school with them, learned beside them, socialized with them, and called many of them friends. But proximity isn’t the same thing as community. I was still the “Urban-Suburban kid,” bused into Brockport every morning and back home to “the city” at the end of the school day. I became very good at navigating white spaces, but I was always aware, sometimes subtly and sometimes painfully, that I was the Black boy who came from somewhere else.
When I look at photographs of Nolan surrounded by white boys, there is a familiarity about the imagery. I recognize the Black boy who appears to belong in the photograph while also knowing there are atleast a thousand words about race, racism, belonging, community, and safety that the photograph by itself can never tell you.
Watching Mrs. Wells this week also made me think about my own mother and the vigilance with which she raised me. There were so many things she simply would not allow me to do. I could not stay after school. Sleepovers were out of the question. I did not go on the eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C. I did not go to prom. At the time, these restrictions felt arbitrary and deeply unfair because I understood these white boys and girls as my friends. I wanted to spend time with them in the same ways they were allowed to spend time with one another, and I could not understand why my mother seemed to see danger where I saw friendship.
As a child, I did not have the language or life experience to understand what she might have been calculating every time she told me no. I only knew that everyone else seemed to be allowed to go, stay, travel, sleep over, and participate while I was expected to come home. It would take adulthood, and nearly two decades of my own work as a Black educator, for me to begin understanding that what felt like overprotection to me as a child may have been my mother trying to protect a Black son in a world she understood in ways I did not yet have the capacity to understand.
In my 2022 essay, I recalled many of those restrictions through the practical realities of being bused so far from home. Brockport was not my community; my family had one car, and simply getting home after an extracurricular activity could be difficult. But at forty, I can also see something I could not fully see then. There were fears my mother may not have had the language, or perhaps the desire, to explain to me. She could send her Black son into a predominantly white school every morning, but she could not control what happened once I entered someone else’s home, got into someone else’s car, went to a party, stayed overnight, or moved into any other space beyond her reach. What I experienced as unfairness may, at least in part, have been her attempt at protection.
That is part of why watching Mrs. Wells was almost unbearable for me. Nolan left for a Fourth of July trip to Horn Island with friends, and his friends returned without him. His body was recovered from the water two days later. More than two months afterward, a Jackson County grand jury declined to indict anyone, finding no credible evidence that anyone on the boats engaged in criminal conduct connected to his death. Mrs. Wells and Nolan’s family are still left trying to understand how all of those things can be true at once and, most painfully, what happened to their son before his body was found.
I am not writing this essay to tell anyone what happened to Nolan Wells because I do not know. His mother does not have those answers either, and watching her sit inside that uncertainty brought me back to something I now understand about my own mother. A Black mother can spend eighteen years trying to anticipate danger, setting boundaries her child resents, saying no when everyone else seems to be saying yes, and doing everything she knows to do to keep her child safe. There still comes a point when that child moves beyond her reach.
That is why I keep returning to the thought that I could have been Nolan Wells. There were so many moments in my own adolescence when I was the Black boy in a group of white children, out in a world my mother could not control, believing I was simply with my friends. I came home from those moments. Nolan did not. The distance between those two outcomes is what devastates me.
Don’t Call Him a Man
Mrs. Wells’s insistence to call Nolan a boy pushes back against the racist ideology that stereotypes Black boys as men, regardless of their age. Nolan was eighteen, but he was also still somebody’s child, and Black children since the Jim Crow era are rarely given the benefit or the humanity of innocence. Black boys are routinely imagined as older, stronger, and more threatening than they are, while Black girls are pushed toward adulthood before they have been allowed the full vulnerability of what it means to be a little girl. In that context, insisting on Nolan’s childhood feels like an act of reclamation.
It also brings me back to Najya. Beneath all the debate about what her parents chose, what her schools provided or failed to provide, and what any of it means for American education, there is still a Black girl trying to explain what it felt like to be the child living with choices that were not hers. Her question to her mother about whether anyone had thought about her exists beside Mrs. Wells’s insistence on Nolan’s childhood. The circumstances could not be more different, but both have made me think about how quickly Black children become responsible for carrying the weight of adulthood instead of being able to be just a child.
There’s No Winning
Black parents are expected to make extraordinarily consequential decisions inside systems already shaped by racism and then judged afterward as though there had been some perfect choice available to them.
Send your child to a predominantly Black school, and you may have to contend with the consequences of segregation and disinvestment.
Send them to a predominantly white one, and greater resources may come with isolation, assimilation, and racism.
Hold your Black son close, and you are overprotective.
Give him freedom, and he may get gunned down by a racist white man, a racist police officer, or found dead on a trip surrounded by a group of friends.
The children live inside those calculations long before we understand why they are being made. I understand my own parents differently now than I did when they sent me to Brockport, just as I understand my mother’s restrictions differently than I did when I was the child being told no. That understanding does not require me to pretend those choices did not hurt. A decision can open doors and still cost a child something. A parent can act from love and fear and still make a choice their child later has to reckon with.
That is why I am less interested in reaching a verdict on Nikole Hannah-Jones than I am in listening to Najya. The public conversation keeps drifting toward whether her mother was right or wrong, whether integration or Black schools are the answer, when Najya’s own story makes clear how inadequate those binaries are. She can value what being educated among Black children gave her and still name what she did not receive academically. Those truths do not cancel each other out.
Before Najya became evidence in a national argument about education, she was a curious little girl. Before Nolan became the subject of headlines, investigations, and a grand jury, he was somebody’s child. And before I could explain my own education through the language of segregation, integration, racism, and public policy, I was simply Calvin, a little Black boy at School No. 7 who loved his friends and assumed he would be back the next year.
What I keep returning to is the impossible burden placed on Black families to somehow outmaneuver racism through individual choices.
Choose the right school.
Move to the right zip code.
Give your child enough freedom but not too much.
Prepare them for racism without making them afraid of the world.
Protect them without making their childhood feel like a cage.
Then, when racism reaches them anyway, we turn back toward the family and ask what they should have done differently.
Maybe that is the question we need to stop asking.
Najya should have been able to receive an academically rigorous education surrounded by Black children. I should not have needed proximity to whiteness to gain access to quality educational resources. Mrs. Wells should have been able to watch her son leave with friends and hold the ordinary expectation that her child would come home alive.
There is no winning when every available choice has already been shaped by racism, and Black mothers alone should never have been tasked with finding the one choice racism cannot reach.
Help Me Fund An Electric Wheelchair
Since getting my mobility scooter in early June, I have learned a lot about what mobility support looks like in everyday life. My scooter has been great in the community, but because I live on the second floor, bringing it up and down two flights of stairs every day is not practical.
I have realized that I also need a mobility option that works inside my home, especially for cooking, household tasks, and conserving energy. A lightweight, foldable electric wheelchair would make a real difference.
The power chair I am hoping to purchase costs just under $900, and I am raising as much of that as I can. Any amount you can contribute would help.
Living disabled is expensive. Mobility equipment, accessibility tools, transportation, copays for my medications, and everyday adaptations add up quickly. I am privileged in many ways, and I also want to be honest about when community support would make something important more accessible to me.
Contribute to my electric wheelchair fund
Sources & Further Reading
SheKnows. “Mom of Nolan Wells Says Son Was ‘Not a Man.’” SheKnows, Sept. 2026.
https://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/1235078507/mom-of-nolan-wells-son-not-a-man/
Boddie, Maya. “‘Let’s Not Call Him a Man’: Nolan Wells’ Mom Reminds Interviewer He Was a Teen.” Black Information Network, 23 Sept. 2026. Jackson’s BIN 98.1
https://jackson.binnews.com/content/2026-09-23-lets-not-call-him-a-man-nolan-wells-mom-reminds-interviewer-he-was-a-teen/
Associated Press. “Mississippi Grand Jury Finds No Cause for Charges in the July Death of Nolan Wells.” Associated Press, 22 Sept. 2026.
https://apnews.com/article/3df99fc3355c696fd2c9cdb3c4f9b947
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The New York Times Magazine, 20 Sept. 2026.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html
Haniyah P. “‘I Was Not Prepared’: Nikole Hannah-Jones on the Backlash She Received From Black Communities for Her NYT Article.” TheGrio, 24 Sept. 2026.
https://thegrio.com/2026/09/24/i-was-not-prepared-nikole-hannah-jones-on-the-backlash-she-received-from-black-communities-for-her-nyt-article/
Eaton, Calvin. “School Integration ‘Saved’ Me But At What Cost.” 540WMain, 11 Jan. 2022.
https://540westmain.org/school-integration-saved-me-but-at-what-cost/
Patton, Stacey. “‘Sometimes I Wish You Had Thought About Me.’ What One Godling Is Teaching Us About Loving Black Children.” Substack, 23 Sept. 2026.
Benbow, Candice Marie. “Mothers and Daughters: Some Thoughts.” Substack, Sept. 2026.
Weber, Jennifer. “What Nikole Hannah-Jones Wouldn’t Let Herself See.” City Journal, Sept. 2026.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/nikole-hannah-jones-essay-daughter-school
Binion, Billy. “Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Experiment Accidentally Undercuts Her Case Against School Choice.” Reason, 23 Sept. 2026.
https://reason.com/2026/09/23/nikole-hannah-jones-experiment-accidentally-undercuts-her-case-against-school-choice/
