I started having conversations about race with my mother when I was about seven years old.

I remember us sitting in stunt silence as we watched news footage of the Philadelphia

Police Department dropping fire bombs on a black neighborhood on a house called the Move

House and seeing black children around my age running naked from the flames.

You see a very dramatic explosion that occurs 30 seconds and really rips into the move compound.

We watched the miniseries roots.

You must hear your name fast.

You are under control.

And the film Miss Sibi Burning.

I am sick and tired of going to the funeral of black men who have been murdered by white

men.

She watched them together.

She bought me books of black poetry and black history and black short stories.

These were my mother's ways of filling me with pride and insulating me from what she knew

with something they come from white America.

She dropped to a knee each morning before school, looked me in the eyes and she'd say,

I am and I'd say, somebody.

She got the idea from an episode of Sesame Street with the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Okay.

Here we go.

I am somebody.

My mom told me that I am somebody and I believed her.

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