clint smith: how to raise a black son in america

Watch Poet Clint Smith’s powerful TED Talk, ‘How to raise a black son in America’.

“All of my black friends were raised with the same message, the talk, given to us when we became old enough to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground, when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared. But what does it do to a child to grow up knowing that you cannot simply be a child? That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath, that you cannot simply be curious, that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake, that someone’s implicit bias might be the reason you don’t wake up in the morning.”
www.clintsmithiii.com/