Please Don't Kill My Black Son, Please (A Memoir in Essays)

Sprung from Wabuke’s Hairpin viral essay, “Five Moments in the Life of a Black Mother”: a deeply poignant memoir in essays exploring the cultural, historical, and personal trauma of Black motherhood in America.


When Hope Wabuke became a mother, she was thrilled—and yet she could not separate her excitement and love from her anxiety. She knew the names of the unarmed Black boys and girls lost in recent years: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Jordan Davis, Ayana Davis, Renisha McBride, Elijah El-Amin, Ahmaud Arbery—and on and on and on. She knew the worst the world was capable of doing to her son. In the years since his birth, Wabuke has confronted first-hand the unique difficulties of protecting and raising her son in the midst of an abusive relationship with his father. With a stunning personal excavation and journalistic rigor, Please Don’t Kill My Black Son, Please wrestles with how America’s violent social and structural inequality has impacted the most vulnerable among us: children and their mothers.

From being followed in stores to navigating the cruel family court system, this book is a testament to the unique reality of being a Black mother to a Black son in America, where racism and violence live at the surface, as does fear for your child’s physical, emotional, and mental safety. As Wabuke traces her own life as a Black woman, scholar, single mother, and domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor, these unflinching essays reflect on the actual impacts of anti-Black racism and the distinctive perils Black mothers are facing. Engaging with the last decade of the Black Lives Matter movement and this country’s ongoing political reckoning, Wabuke maps her personal journey navigating systematic oppression and teaches her son not only to survive, but to thrive.