The day before I started high school, my father took me up to the park around the corner from our house to have “the talk.”
It’s the talk black families had when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida. It’s the talk we had when Michael Brown was shot and killed in Missouri. It’s the talk we had when Tamir Rice was shot and killed in Ohio. And it’s the talk we had when Sandra Bland was found dead in a jail cell following a traffic stop in Texas.
If you’re a black teen, it’s a talk about how to survive.
My dad made sure I understood that I was going to be profiled—even put in danger of harm or arrest—simply because of the color of my skin.
I didn’t have to wait long to experience this harsh reality firsthand. When I was 16, my friends and I walked through a popular entertainment store in Cambridge, Massachusetts to meet up with some of our classmates.
A security guard at the door stopped us.
He looked at each of us, and then asked us to empty our backpacks. Confused, we protested that we hadn’t touched anything—and we hadn’t. But the image of three young black guys passing through a store with backpacks was enough make the security guard suspicious. It felt like he was presuming our guilt.
My friends and I were lucky enough to be released without charge. However, on any given day, over 50,000 young people are detained in state and local prisons nationwide. Although young black people are just 17 percent of the nation’s juvenile population, we account for 31 percent of all juvenile arrests.
