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My Black Stepson Became a White Chauvinist
We lost him down a YouTube rabbit hole and don’t know how to get him back
My stepson hasn’t died, but we have lost him all the same. No one has brought us any casseroles.
He came close to dying, actually, last summer, when he accidentally discharged a firearm into his own leg. The bullet missed his femoral artery by millimeters and also graciously, but barely, spared his genitals.
I was almost relieved that the worst had nearly happened because at least he wouldn’t have that damn gun anymore. After nearly shooting off his own penis, surely he wouldn’t buy another one?
But he did. He returned to his job at a convenience store, just five blocks from our home. He continued to rant against the “SJWs,” the so-called Social Justice Warriors like myself and my husband, who had everything all wrong. At 21 years old, he knew better. White men reigned supreme for a reason, a good reason in his book, and everyone else should just shut up and stop whining.
Like many children born to one white parent and one Black parent, my stepson presents as Black. So when he first announced that he more or less considered himself a Proud Boy, my husband and I said, “What?”
We thought surely he must be joking. Just trying to ruffle our feathers.
But he said, very seriously, that he had been watching a lot of YouTube videos and listening to a lot of podcasts and yes, he more or less considered himself a Proud Boy.
“Do the Proud Boys consider you a Proud Boy?” I thought, but didn’t ask.
My stepson had lived with us for a year, at age 16, after which he’d returned to his mother’s home on the opposite coast to finish high school. But he never did finish high school. He found himself battling severe depression, the same severe depression that had originally prompted him to move in with us.
While it wasn’t his first rodeo with depression, it was his first rodeo with antidepressants, which he proceeded to take erratically, exactly as we had feared. (On the phone, the doctor had haughtily ignored our concerns, insisting that medication was the only recourse.)
