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Growing up, I didn't always 
understand why

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my parents made me follow
the rules that they did.

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Like, why did I really 
have to mow the lawn?

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Why was homework really that important?

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Why couldn't I put jelly beans 
in my oatmeal?

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My childhood was abound
with questions like this.

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Normal things about being a kid

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and realizing that sometimes,

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it was best to listen to my parents

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even when I didn't exactly understand why.

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And it's not that they didn't want
me to think critically.

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Their parenting always sought 
to reconcile the tension

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between having my siblings and I
understand the realities of the world,

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while ensuring that we never accepted
the status quo as inevitable.

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I came to realize that this,
in and of itself,

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was a very purposeful form of education.

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One of my favorite educators,

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Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire,

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speaks quiete explicitly about the need
for edcuation to be used

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as a tool for critical awakening

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and shared humanity.

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In his most famous book,

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"Pedagogy of the Oppresed",

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he states, "No one can be 
authentically human

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while he prevents others from being so."

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I've been thinking a lot 
about this lately,

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this idea of humanity,

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and specifically, who in this world
is afforded the privilege

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of being perceived as fully human.

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Over the course of 
the past several months,

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the world has watched as 
unarmed black men, and women,

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have had their lives taken at the hands
of the police and vigilante.

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These events and all that 
has transpired after them

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have brought me back to my own childhood

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and the decisions that
my parents made about

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about raising a black boy in America

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that growing up, I didn't always
understand

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in the way that I do now.


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I think of how hard it must have been,

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how profoundly unfair it must have felt

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for them to feel like 
they had to strip away

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parts of my childhood

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just so that I could come home at night.

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For example, I think of how one night,

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when I was around 12-years-old
on an overnight field trip

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to another city,

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my friends and I bought Super Soakers

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and turned the hotel parking lot
into our own

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into our own water-filled battle zone.

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We hid behind cars,

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running through the darkness that
laid between the streetlights,

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boundless laughter ubiquitous 
across the pavement.

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But within ten minutes,

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my father came outside,

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grabbed my by my forearm

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and lead me unto our room
with an unfamiliar grip.

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Before I could say anything,

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tell him how foolish he had 
made me look in front of my friends,

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he derided me for being so naive.

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Looked me in the eye,

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fear consuming his face,

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and said, "Son, I'm sorry,

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but you can't act the same 
as your white friends.

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You can't pretend to shoot guns.

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You can't run around in the dark.

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You can't hide behind anything
other than your own teeth."

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I know now how scared he must have been,

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how easily I could have fallen
into the empty of the night,

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that some man would mistake this water

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for a good reason to wash
all of this away.

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These are the sorts of messages
I've been inundated with

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my entire life:


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always keep your hands where
they can see them,

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don't move too quickly,

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take off your hood when the sun goes down.

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My parents raised me and my siblings
in an armor of advice,

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an ocean of alarm bells so someone
wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs,

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so that they wouldn't make
a memory of this skin.

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So that we could be kids,

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not casket or concrete.

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And it's not because they thought it
would make us better than anyone else

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it's simply because they wanted 
to keep us alive.

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All of my black friends were raised
with the same message:

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the talk, given to us when we
were old enough

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to be mistaken for a nail ready
to be hammered to the ground,

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when people made our melanin
synonymous with something to be feared.

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But what does it do to a child,

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to grow up knowing that you
cannot simply be a child?

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That the whims of adolescence
are too dangerous for your breath,

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that you cannot simply be curious,

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that you are not afforded the luxury
of making a mistake,

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that someone's implicit bias 
might be the reason

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you don't wake up in the morning.


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But this cannot be what defines us.

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Because we have parents that 
raised us to understand

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that our bodies weren't meant
for the backside of a bullet,

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but for flying kites and jumping rope

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and laughing until our stomachs burst.

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We had teachers who taught us
how to raise our hands

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in class, and not just 
to signal surrender

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and that the only thing
we should give up

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is the idea that we aren't worthy
of this world.

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So when we say that black lives matter,

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it's not because others don't,

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it's simply because we must affirm
that we are worthy

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of existing without fear

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when so many things 
tell us that we are not.

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I want to live in a world where my son
will not be presumed "guilty"

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the moment he is born,

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where a toy in his hand is not mistaken
for anything other than a toy.

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And I refuse to accept that we can't
build this world into something new,

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some place where a child's name 
doesn't have to be

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written on a t-shirt or a tombstone,

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where the value of someone's life
isn't determined

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by anything other than the fact
that they had lungs,

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a place where every single one 
of us can breathe.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)