What's It Like to be a Young Black Man?
I’m not black. But I am starting to identify with the fear and hopelessness and despair of being black, and male. It all came home to me when I realized that a friend, the mother of two young black sons, would have to have “the talk” with them. Imagine. Not the one telling your son to make sure he wears a condom, but the one that says, don’t move too quickly when you’re out in public. What is it like to have to tell your kids to, as Don Lemon put it on CNN, “Comply, comply, comply,” when a cop approaches you? And what is it like to have a cop shoot you anyway, when you are complying and reaching for your license as the cop told you to do? The prescience of that little 4-year-old in the back seat, soothing her mother, live-streaming the encounter between the cop and her boyfriend, comforting her that, somehow, some way, it would be OK. But how? I know I sound like a bleeding heart liberal but how can it be OK when a young black man can’t feel free to run at ni...