I think about black children at times like this.

To see what could’ve been their older brother, (Michael Brown), or their father (Eric Garner) or even themselves (Tamir Rice) killed in state sanctioned terror and every apparatus, whether it be police or government officials or media circuits and even people who they probably befriended giving them excuse after excuse as to why it was not only justified, but morally sound to end the lives of these people.

People who look like them. People who existed in their communities. People who could have been someone they knew. People who were someone they knew. To have these images of premature and manufactured death flashing on their TV screens simultaneously, from all corners of the country. To live with the cognitive dissonance that they probably couldn’t even label of knowing that those who “protect and serve” take a vested interest in killing black people. What does that say to a young black child? That their existence is inherently antagonistic to the well being of the rest of the world?

The consequence and irony of black childhood is that innocence is never afforded and what ivory tower pundits have to learn through years of academic research about the prison industrial complex- how it both cages and terminates black life- is well known to those who its inaccessible to.