If you’re a black teen, it\u2019s a talk about how to survive.<\/p>\n
My dad made sure I understood that I was going to be profiled \u2014 even put in danger of harm or arrest \u2014 simply because of the color of my skin.<\/p>\n
I didn’t have to wait long to experience this harsh reality firsthand. When I was 16, my friends and I walked through a popular entertainment store in Cambridge, Massachusetts to meet up with some of our classmates.<\/p>\n
![\"alone_discrimination_crime_youth\"](\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/11456051335_baec7d42c5_k-600x400.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDerek Mindler \/ Flickr<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A security guard at the door stopped us.<\/p>\n
He looked at each of us, and then asked us to empty our backpacks. Confused, we protested that we hadn\u2019t touched anything \u2014 and we hadn’t. But the image of three young black guys passing through a store with backpacks was enough make the security guard suspicious. It felt like he was presuming our guilt.<\/p>\n
My friends and I were lucky enough to be released without charge. However, on any given day, over 50,000 young people are detained<\/a> in state and local prisons nationwide. Although young black people are just 17 percent of the nation’s juvenile population<\/a>, we account for 31 percent of all juvenile arrests.<\/a><\/p>\n Kalief Browder<\/a> \u2014 a 16 year-old kid from New York \u2014 was once accused of stealing, just like us. Awaiting trial for robbing someone of a backpack \u2014 a crime he said he didn’t commit \u2014 Browder wound up spending three years at the notorious Rikers Island prison before the charges were finally dropped. He spent two of those years in solitary confinement.<\/p>\n Browder\u2019s torture was so severe that he took his own life shortly after his release in 2013. He was just 22.<\/p>\n President Barack Obama mentioned Browder recently, when he issued an executive order banning juvenile solitary confinement<\/a> in federal prisons. That was a welcome step, though it leaves the much greater number of young people locked up in state and local prisons without the same protection.<\/p>\n The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision Montgomery v. Louisiana<\/em><\/a>, on the other hand, does offer some relief<\/a> to incarcerated youth at the state level. The ruling upheld a previous decision that mandatory life sentences without parole for people under 18 were unconstitutional. Moreover, it worked retroactively, requiring that anyone who’d received the sentence when they were still underage must have the opportunity to argue for their release.<\/p>\n These two decisions reflect positive steps towards criminal justice reform, but they’re only helpful to young people who’ve already been arrested and locked up. That’s not enough.\u00a0Every level of our legal system must be examined not only for inhumane detention practices and police brutality, but also racial profiling.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know Kalief Browder, but I do know that the criminal justice system sees me the same way it saw him. That’s because we share three traits that presume our guilt<\/a>: Being young, black, and male.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to change that. Because I don\u2019t want to have to give \u201cthe talk\u201d to my own child.<\/p>\n The post I Am Kalief Browder<\/a> appeared first on OtherWords<\/a>.<\/p>\n This piece was reprinted from Other Words<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The day before I started high school, my father took me up to the park around the corner from our house to have \u201cthe talk.\u201d It\u2019s the talk black families had when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida. It\u2019s the talk we had when Michael Brown was shot and killed in Missouri. It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-225809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}