Existing while black

This is something so many white people (and some people of other races, including a few African-Americans) don’t understand. They don’t see the day-to-day realities for black Americans.  Sure they might see an isolated incident, but they don’t see the ongoing microaggressions…the daily indignities that blacks experience. They see things on an individual and isolated level, rather than the aggregate.  When you try to point it out to many of them and connect these events to a larger pattern of systemic racism, they try to justify the mistreatment or the racial profiling or the extrajudicial killing.  As if there is something that justifies how we’re treated. Some reason that Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Darrien Hunt, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Rumain Brisbon had their lives snuffed out.  Some justification for why blacks (and hispanics) are stopped and frisked more often than white people. Why is it so hard for white Americans to believe the lived experiences of black Americans? Why do we have to try so much harder to get people to listen to and believe our stories?

Oh wait. I know the answer to that. It starts with “Black lives” and ends with “don’t matter”.