The "talk" a white father had with his son.

Dear son:

Almost every African-American father in this country has to  have "the talk" with his son.

Because of the history of this country African-American fathers have to tell their sons to act with extreme caution around police officers. If a black kid gets pulled over while driving or stopped while walking down the street or grabbed at a high school party and he responds in anything but a completely deferential manner he risks getting shot.

We talked a lot about that this year because of what was on the news.

While we are most distinctly white, we need to have a talk as well. Fortunately, our talk is not that close to life and death.

Simply put, we are lucky -- historically speaking.

History is something we live in, not something that we have put behind us, not something that you can look up on the internet if you need to, and you need to be taught and learn this history in order to even have a half a chance of glimpsing even for a second a semi accurate vision of yourself and the world you occupy with others.

With that in mind, here is the single main point of this "talk."

You are never, under any circumstances to use the word "nigger."

If you absolutely need to at some point you may refer to the word as the "N-word" as I will do for the rest of this letter.

Many find this euphemism  awkward or disingenuous because N-word is a word you will, in fact, hear a lot: in gyms, in movies, in schools, in malls, on the train, in streets, certainly in music. You will hear it in a lot of contexts. Sometimes it is intended to hurt. Sometimes it is intended to undo hurt. Sometimes it is used to show solidarity. Sometimes it is casual.

That it is out there, however, is not relevant at all to my point and to my rule for you.

I don't care about the regularity of its use. You just never use it.

Ever.

In fact, I like the fact that our euphemism -- the "N-word" -- sounds odd or disingenuous  to some, like we are trying to cover some thing without really covering it.

 That is precisely what we are trying to do. Cover or manage an awful history that we live in or with, like a scar on our body we want to hide -- but can't. The "N-word" should sound pathetic, tinged with shame, scared.

As I said, we live in the wake of history. And we hold its triumphs, and its scars. Those roads we drive on, the schools you go to, the doctor's care  that have kept you and so many others alive and well -- everything you enjoy and need was created by other people that came long before us.

And just as you enjoy and use the good things you didn't create, you have to stand the burden of the bad things you didn't create, even at age 10. That is what it means to live in history.

 It means to be responsive, and responsible to this "other" world that literally called you in to being -- whether you wanted it to or no. And, generally speaking, you have been luckier than most in the place in to which you have been called by history. If you take human history at its broadest, and you are alive and living healthy in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2015, you are easily within the top 5% of the luckiest humans who have ever lived, no matter what else happens to you.

But back to more recent history: this country was founded on slavery. Its very survival depended on white people owning black people as "property." For the country as you know it to go forward, to get started, this practice had to be included in our founding documents and ideas. Without a collective understanding that slavery had to exist, the land of the "free and the brave" wouldn't be -- as odd at that sounds.

Quite simply, the "N-word" was used everyday to enable that horrific system to move forward some 75 years.

That system, in turn, weakened only in 1865 after thousands of lives were lost in the Civil War.

We really only know the numbers of soldiers lost in that war.

Slaves? We weren't able to count.

Those people don't even exist as numbers in history.

At some point soon, if you haven't already, someone will say to you "Slavery ended in the Civil War! I never owned slaves" as if this absolves them or frees them somehow of the history we live in.

 It doesn't.

And when you hear this argument you are to mark the person (in your mind) a fool or uninformed or both and move on with that knowledge recorded. At best, at your age, you are to say simply, "I don't see history that way." Once into adulthood you will have to choose for yourself how and in what way to engage full on stupidity. I have no good answers for you there, only to urge caution.

The horrors of slavery persisted well after the war. We only imagine that wars end. They don't. Black people were routinely captured and shot and bullied and forced to live segregated lives, despite their "freedom" in this "long ago time."

Think this: Grandpa was born in 1925 in Georgia.

You are good at math.

Let's put that math to use then: Is 1865 that long ago? Is there a big difference between 1865 and 1925? 1925 not part of your life? Grandpa?

Here is another number: 700,000 people live in the city of Detroit right now. One city in America. Estimate the number of people in the country between 2015 and 1865 who have been hurt, either in the extreme or in a slight, in this "long ago" history that organized itself around the "N-word."

Lots, huh?

In 1965, massive Civil Rights laws had be enacted to try to correct this history from the end of the Civil War. You remember who was born in 1965, right? Me. Mom. Do the math. Because, again, the passage of the Civil Rights did not "fix" this history.

Given this, I hope when someone says to you, as they still do to me, "why can't I use that word?" -- as if a freedom is being denied them -- I want you to think of these numbers now swirling in your big math brain and assign each number a face, a name, a face and a name of someone you love -- not a vague image of a character from TV in costume --  and then ask yourself if you are, in fact, being denied a freedom in not being able to use this single word. Or, are you, in fact, in some small way, simply marking an enormous wound in your mind's eye?

Your "right to free speech" is not a right to say whatever pops into your head and then claim some abstract protection as if you have been grievously wronged. Make note of fools who think this, too.

One more math fact: this word only points to one of history's horrors. One. One of thousands. So you will be told, at some point, too, of any number of different persecutions. And, strangely, you will be told that because these countless other horrors have happened your Dad is overdoing it with the restriction on the "N-word". It isn't special, you will hear, as if these other horrors somehow open the door for making things worse with this particular horror -- and this particular word.

The absurdity of this argument, I trust, you already can dismiss for yourself, even as a fourth grader.

The word isn't magic or sacred but a way of reminding yourself that, again, we live in history, not apart from it. Neither you nor anyone else gets to walk away at complete ease.

Although on many days it will seem as if you, in fact, had left history behind. You have grown up, for example, knowing only an African-American President. The world you live in is filled with people and names and cultures that probably would have baffled Grandpa. Many of them close friends, family.

But history is like your own body. You never really leave it. Some of the wounds and scars, physical and emotional, you take even now will come back to you when you are my age.

Everyone knows this is true of their body, but they can't seem to accept it is true of the body politic as well.

Now, please don't get confused. Not using the word will not somehow make you a better person. It will not make you "good." It certainly won't make you "better" than other people.  And it certainly won't free or liberate you from the horrible conflicts that surround it. You will be called any number of different things in life that are hurtful and that will prompt you think, "well, if I get called this, then..." Don't. Hypocrisies will abound in any discussion of the term. Indeed, the hypocrisies that surround any critique of the term often generate even more insidious uses of the term. When I tell you not to use it, then, I am not handing you a magic talisman. I am just telling as your father what not to do with a single word.

That is, I am preaching what some call zero tolerance only to you, zero tolerance of yourself using the word.

But never think zero tolerance can work as a policy for others, one you or some institution can impose on others. There can't be a zero tolerance policy for history. History is, and you set up any institution or individual for failure if you ask them to stand athwart it, outside it, above it. No one is. And we will all fail at some point, just as our institutions that help us live will fail at points.

Indeed, attempts to purge or cleanse a wrong like this often redound on the very people who call for them in the heat of passion or what, for us, is the "heat of the media moment" -- something very different from very real human passion. So history shows if we can be bothered to look.

Not using this word, however, will force you (and that is both my main concern and perhaps  the only point where I can exert some influence on history) in one small way to understand your place in history, the way history shapes all us, and the way history always will shape us.

I insist on this: this is one word you can't seize hold of -- no matter your wealth, your technology, your position of safety -- and master.

And for that understanding there really is no word.