Growing up,
I didn't always understand why my parents
made me follow the rules that they did.
Like, why did I really have to mow the lawn?
Why was homework really that important?
Why couldn't I put jelly beans in my oatmeal?
My childhood was abound with questions like this.
Normal things,
like being a kid
and realizing that sometimes,
it was best to listen to my parents
even when I didn't exactly know why.
And it's not that they didn't want me to think critically.
Their parenting always sought to reconcile
the tension between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world,
while ensuring that we never accept the status quo as inevitable.
I came to realize that this,
in and of itself,
was a very purposeful form of education.
One of my favorite educators,
Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire,
speaks quiete explicitly about the need for edcuation to be used
as a tool for critical awakening,
and shared humanity.
In his most famous book,
"Pedagogy of the Oppresed",
he states, "No one can be authentically human
while he prevents others from being so."
I've been thinking a lot about this lately.
This idea of humanity.
And specifically, who in this world is afforded the privilege
of being perceived as fully human.
Over the course of the past several months,
the world has watched as unarmed black men, and women,
have had their lives taken at the hands of the police and vigilante.
These events and all that has transpired after them
have brought me back to my own childhood
and the decisions that my parents made about
raising a black boy in America
that growing up,
I didn't always understand in a way that I do now.
I think of how hard it must have been,
how profoundly unfair it must have felt
for them to feel like they had to strip away
parts of my childhood
just so that I could come home at night.
For example, I think of how one night,
when I was around 12-years-old on an overnight field trip to another city,
my friends and I bought Supersoakers
and turned the hotel parking lot into our own
water-filled battle zone.
We hid behind cars,
running through the darkness that laid between the streetlights,
boundless laughter ubiquitous across the pavement.
But within ten minutes,
my father came outside,
grabbed my by my forearm
and lead me unto our room with an unfamiliar grip.
Before I could say anything,
tell him how foolish he had made me look in front of my friends,
he derided me for being so naive.
Looked me in the eye,
fear consuming his face,
and said, "Son, I'm sorry,
but you can't act the same as your white friends.
You can't pretend to shoot guns.
You can't run around in the dark.
You can't hide behind anything other than your own teeth."
I know now how scared he must have been.
How easily I could have fallen into the empty of the night,
that some man would mistake this water
for reason to wash all of this away.
These are the sorts of messages I've been inundated with
my entire life:
Always keep your hands where they can see them,
don't move too quickly,
take off your hood when the sun goes down.
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice,
an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs,
so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin.
So that we could be kids,
not casket or concrete.
And it's not because they thought it would make us better than anyone else,
it's simply because they wanted to keep us alive.
All of my black friends were raised with the same message:
the talk, given to us when we were old enough
to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground,
when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared.
But what does it do to a child,
to grow up knowing that you simply cannot be a child?
That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath,
that you cannot simply be curious,
that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake,
that someone's implicit bias may be
the reason why you don't wake up in the morning.
But this cannot be what defines us.
Because we have parents that raised us to understand
that our bodies weren't meant for the backside of a bullet,
but for flying kites and jumping rope
and laughing until our stomach burst.
We had teachers who taught us how to raise our hands
in class, and not just to signal surrender
and that the only thing we should give up
is the idea that we aren't worthy of this world.
So when we say that black lives matter,
it's not because others don't,
it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy
of existing without fear
when so many things tell us that we are not.
I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed "guilty"
the moment he is born,
where a toy in his hand is not mistaken for anything other than a toy.
And I refuse to accept that we can't build this world into something new,
a place where a child's name doesn't have to be
written on a t-shirt or a tombstone,
where the value of someone's life isn't determined
by anything other than the fact that they had lungs,
a place where every single one of us can breathe.
Thank you.
(Applause)