My son is my entire world wrapped into a ball of energy and sweetness I can not imagine life without. My son is also Black. I grew up in a very different world, then he will know, and I can only shelter him from this chaos and the ugliness for so long. He will be a child of two worlds. The world he has grown up in and the way the world views him as a Black Man.
I want my son to hold his head high and be proud of who he is, what he looks like, what his cultures entail, and who his ancestors were and experienced. I want his future to be a long and bright, just like any other mother, but my son's life expectancy is dependant on the civility of others.
Education is typically lower for African American men, employment is harder to come by, and the poverty rate for African American's is twice as high to all men. Police brutality is killing young Black men across this country daily, and all some people can say is, "Oh, he shouldn't have been there." No, people in this country have the right to be wherever they want whenever. There are laws, but it is not against the law to be Black.
My child will not only get the talk about safe driving and being aware of your surroundings. My husband and I will also give him a stringent talk about not moving your hands if pulled over by the police. Why? Because the police might think he's reaching for a weapon, and a simple "traffic violation" would become an unproven homicide. The world did not change at the abolition of slavery, nor during Reconstruction, nor during the Civil Rights Movement. The racial divide continues. Old prejudices are not extinct. People still proudly call out racists and hateful rhetoric to their neighbors and strangers alike.
Black Lives Matter, not because anyone else is less valuable, but because they are under siege. And the beauty of this country, according to the founding fathers, is the ability to peacefully assemble and protest even when it is not the most ideal time or place. The point is change needs to occur, and we need to speak up, we need to cause a scene, and we need people to change their minds and hearts and realize we all bleed red and we are all HUMAN. Stand up and say something!
"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." ~President Barack Obama
