I'm afraid to raise sons in this world
Black men who will be profiled and targeted from my womb,
young black boys walking anywhere full of pride or anything signifying life who might be used for target practice and filling up tombs.
It's scary to think they might lose the sparkle in their eyes leaving a corner store, leaving for college, or shaking hands with the corner boy.
Giving birth to a black boy has become the prelude to planning a candlelight vigil and funeral.
I'm mourning for my boys!
Boys they'll label men alongside pictures of deuces up and Halloween costume grills instead of boys running around backyards or in caps and gowns or just working hard to pay their bills.
Can I tell you how it pains me to think of all the black mothers who every day breathe a sigh of relief that their boy just made it to eighteen?
Escaping the school-to-prison pipeline systematically designed to brainwash their malleable minds then mass incarcerate them and steal their lives?
It's driving me crazy the way they Mike Brown, Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin, Emmet Till our babies.
Making public spectacles out of our boys to scare our communities – disregarding black life by spilling our blood in the streets.
Young boys don't bleed any different from me or you, but they know if they bleed them out before they become men they won't have a chance to father more sons that have to be killed off too.
My boys – black boys with Skittles and Arizona tea in Sanford and New Orleans and D.C. and Chicago and Memphis and Detroit just trying to survive in a world not tailored to their destiny,
and even when they're unarmed with their hands up, news media still calls them the enemy.
But I'll march today, tweet tomorrow, and shout until I don't have to fear for my sons.
Because I'd rather not have them at all than bring them into this world staring down the barrel of police guns.