What if every time you walked to the corner store, men stood outside the doors with their hands on their guns? You'd get off the bus or step off the train and they'd be hiding on the other side of the ramp... watching. Waiting. Hunting. Another youth, 16-year-old Kimani Gray, was murdered by America's least trained and most prominent figures of authority. Brooklyn is angry... and you don't want Brooklyn angry. A little over a year ago, we lost Trayvon Martin to a "militia man" upholding the same values, enforcing the same stereotype: Black boys are up to no good.
I'm tired of explaining my pain. "What did he do?" my mom asked this morning. She thinks I like just like to fight fights but she doesn't understand. She's a fair-skinned, Dominican woman with a Black daughter who attended a predominately white high-school and college on purpose: I was there for the education, not the people. I left both the schools with few friends, a proud understanding of who I was and experience of what the majority thought of me based on how they tended to interact with me; with fear. I'm of the darkest complexion in my immediate family; I had a different father. Fortunately, I will resemble my sons and I'll know how they feel. Even more fortunate is that I'm a woman, and an educated one at that. I could escape if I wanted to. I could marry a man lighter than myself in an attempt to "save" my sons from the pain of being Black. I see the excitement in foreign eyes as they fantasize whether the animal within me could satisfy them better than their own. For me, that's out of the question. Another option: I could move to a "nicer" neighborhood and find a brotha who has also "espaced" the hood --who lives in a world of forever college with white girls and kegs where they'll never be taken home to daddy and they're too inebriated to care. I don't have anything personally against those brothas... they're just not made for me, obviously. Issue is... my type die before they reach 18. Our government is always at fault. 
