The Sons We Raise

In “The Air We Breathe,” I wrote about the cultural inheritance of racism and misogyny, poisons absorbed so deeply we treat them as normal. This essay continues that reckoning. The air hasn’t cleared; it has only thickened, and the sons we raise are still breathing it in. We will never change or heal what we refuse to name, not the racism, nor the misogyny, and the men we make will carry it, as we have. Confession is not weakness; it is the first act of a moral awareness. When men begin to name and face the truth about the power we have abused, a door, a space may open that gives permission for a kind of masculinity that does not need domination to feel whole and successful. The future of our children and grandchildren will not be the world we describe, but the one we build. We can choose. We do every day. Every act of humility, every moment of listening, every surrender of privilege can be a stone pulled from the wall we built between us and the truth. We begin this with power, ownership, and conflict; we can end it with responsibility. And so, we begin here.

We raise our sons to protect what we take, not to question why it is ours, or if it should be. That single sentence carries the inheritance of our age, a bitter seed we still sow and water every day. It speaks to race and gender, privilege and fear, and the way we disguise control as care. I write not to accuse, but to confess. We are the fathers of a culture built on ownership, of land, of women, of truths that should never be. We pass those ideas down like commandments. They define us and mark our success. It is our inheritance.

We are watching the full bloom of that inheritance now. A male-dominated Supreme Court, built from the same old architecture of entitlement, strikes down Roe v. Wade and calls it justice. Across the country, legislatures filled with men debate and decide what women may do with their bodies, their pregnancies, their futures, all under the banner of “we know best.” The language hasn’t changed much from our fathers’ time: protect the unborn, protect the family, protect morality. But protection always hides ownership and power. What is being protected is not lives, not the children, but the system of control and ownership, male authority hiding behind laws propaganda, and religiosity as moral order.

The hands that write laws to defend women also silence them, and the highest court in the land says it’s fine. The same pulpits that preach virtue still tell women to submit. Across social media, whole communities of men gather to reassert power through resentment, a gospel of grievance replacing any notion of grace. This is not history; it is habit. It is today. It lives in our politics, our pews, our households, and in the sons, and yes, some daughters who learn from us.

We used to call it raising gentlemen. We teach our sons to open doors, to stand when a woman enters the room, to say “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir.” We tell ourselves we are teaching respect, but beneath that chivalry lives a quieter lesson; men command the space, and women exist within it. The rituals of respect are never neutral; they are power dressed in manners. The same hand that opens the door, too often also decides who can pass through it. Politeness becomes camouflage for power. It lets us maintain dominance without appearing cruel, to control while appearing kind. So, the boy watching his father open the door for his mother learns something his father never says out loud: that a man’s virtue lies not in equality, but in authority softened by charm.

Our fathers rarely speak of empathy. They speak of toughness, of grit, of “being a man.” We learn to measure our worth in victories on the field, in the boardroom, in the argument. It is competition and in every competition is conflict. Men teach that emotion is weakness and dominance is winning and survival. It isn’t always through words. Sometimes it’s through silence. A joke that goes unchallenged. A tear that draws a frown. A quiet approval that comes when we hide our pain instead of naming it. Power is rewarded early; feeling is not.

So, we grow into men who can conquer but not connect. We build walls of strength so thick we can no longer feel what we have walled out. A man who is not allowed to feel cannot love honestly. These things too are an inheritance running parallel to the inheritance of our whiteness, both teaching superiority disguised as self-control. We are told to lead, not to listen, to win, not to understand. We learn power without empathy and then wonder why the world we shape is cruel.

Our culture defines its control as protection. The plantation owner said he was providing for and protecting his family. The sheriff says he is protecting the peace. The husband says he is protecting his wife. Each one is protecting what he believes is his to own. The same gospel of protection justified and justifies slavery, segregation, and patriarchy. It tells us that white men must defend their homes, their women, and their way of life, but protection is only a polite name for fear, a fear of losing dominance, a fear of equality that demands sharing power, and a fear of truth. We raise sons to believe their purpose is to guard something defined as sacred, but we never ask whether it is authentically sacred or if it is a thing stolen. The language of protection flatters our moral instincts while hiding our moral failures. If a man believes he must protect what is his, he never wonders if it should be his at all. That reveals weakness.

To change the culture, what should we do? Obviously, we must face truth with courage. We owe confession. We have to name the damage we do, the silences we keep, the myths we still believe. We owe restraint. We have to stop taking, assuming, dominating under the guise of protection and love. We owe an awakening to learn again what strength, truth, and success mean. It is not easy. The world we inherit is built on a hierarchy that feels natural because it has been rehearsed for centuries. We are inured to it, but what may seem natural is not the same as truth.

The work now is not to perfect our control, but to dismantle it. A new kind of male awareness must emerge, one that measures strength not in conquest but in conscience. An awareness secure enough to be gentle, brave enough to admit ignorance, and strong enough, secure enough to stand beside, not above. The only protection worth teaching is the protection of the powerless from us.