MALIBU – When Absinthe Carson drove her six and eight-year-old daughters to Alyssa Milano Elementary School this morning, her 11-year-old son, LeShawn X, was on a bus headed across town to Hollow Point Middle School in Compton. Instead of attending his last year at Milano, LaShawn enrolled in a school he felt would better suit his cultural heritage. Hollow Point students are predominantly African American and, although LeShawn was born a white girl, he identifies as an African American man.
“When Blossom told us she was transitioning to an African American man and changing her name to LaShawn X, we were ecstatic,” gushed his father, Abercrombie Carson. “Just the idea that our family would be culturally and ethnically diverse made us positively giddy. Everybody in our gated community is elated to have a black man living amongst them.”
LeShawn X is a precocious 11-year-old with freckles and a winning smile. According to his parents, when he was three he complained about the lack of diversity in the family. When he was four his preschool teacher called his parents, curious about their daughter’s penchant for reading books by writers that included Huey Newton, James Baldwin and Sammy Davis Jr.
“From an early age, Blossom, as she was called then, was politically savvy and particularly drawn to social justice issues,” his mother recalled. “By the time she was six she had started the first Black Panther chapter in Malibu, hung a big poster of Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson above her bed and celebrated Kwanzaa. So when she informed us during Black History Month that she was transitioning to a black man, not only were we not surprised, we wondered why she’d waited so long.”
Thatcher Carson, LeShawn’s 17-year-old brother, is a celebrated player on his high school’s coed badminton team and plans to attend Columbia University next year where he’ll major in Origami Science with a minor in Conformity. Thatcher says it was his African American brother who inadvertently made him aware of his white privilege.
“Until I began spending time with LeShawn, I was clueless about the privilege I was afforded because of the color of my skin. Seeing first hand what a black man experiences in a racist white supremacist society had a deep impact on me. When I took LaShawn to the mall I was shocked how I was able to stroll unencumbered through stores without a care while he was repeatedly followed and harassed by security personnel. I’ve had my driver’s license for a year and never been pulled over. But now when LeShawn’s with me the police routinely pull us over with harsh interrogations about ambiguous traffic infractions. When LeShawn told me his African American community refers to it as driving while black, I was ashamed I’d been so blind to the daily injustices my little brother suffers.”
With an hour to kill before picking up her two youngest from school, Absinthe Carson sat contentedly in her favorite Starbucks sipping a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Crème Frappuccino. She’d paused to reflect on the book she was reading, Between the World and Me, by her favorite writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates. After several moments she wiped a tear from her eye, pulled her journal from her backpack and took pen in hand:
My ancestors enslaved my son’s ancestors and there’s nothing I can do to change that. Every day I am overwhelmed with shame. For hundreds of years his people have endured the worst kinds of atrocities and yet white supremacy still thrives today. I’m astonished by his courage, because he sure didn’t get it from me. His determination to fight the oppression and injustice he and his people still suffer fills me with hope. I am in awe of his fortitude and will work hard to stay strong as he suffers the slings and arrows of intolerance in his desperate struggle to reach the mountain top. Godspeed, LaShawn. Godspeed.
©The Daily Rash 2019
