Personal Narrative: Black Lives Matter

My childhood was bound with questions of why. Why can 't I stay out late? Why can 't I wear that? Why can 't I go there with my friends?

At the time, I never understood the reason my parents limited what I could. But after all the killings of unarmed black men, I finally realized that they wanted to give me a sense of the reality of the world around me.

Above all, they wanted to have me come home at night.

My parents raised my brother and I in an armor of advice. "Always keep your hands where they can be seen. Don 't move to quickly. Take your hood off after the sun goes down."

The consistent warnings made us feel as if we couldn 't breath at times, but everything they said was to ensure someone wouldn 't confuse our melanin with something to be mistaken for fear, and steal the breath from our lungs, turning us into caskets instead of

All my African American friends had the same conversations with their parents, so as children we were never afforded the luxury of being curious or making a mistake. Since it takes one small moment for someone 's unconscious bias to be the reason we don 't wake up in the morning.

So when we say Black Lives Matter, its not that others don 't, its just we 're able to confirm that we exist in this world without the fear