(For Jordan, Trayvon, Adrien, and Renisha- You’ll be missed)

There’s a war on our youth. I guess the black in our veins doesn’t flow the way white people think it should, and maybe they’re just now realizing, so now they’re killing us.

Nowadays the AriZona Tea and original skittles they sell at the AmPm near my house seems like bait, like maybe there’s a white man, no excuse me, he’s half hispanic, waiting for me behind the doors of those refrigerators, or behind the counter protected by the uncertainty to accuse, or in the voice of every white liberal with an Obama sticker on their car whose ever locked their door at the sight of me waiting for the bus, or in the pen of every college admissions officer whose ever looked at an application of a black youth and said ‘there’s too much risk in it; They’d just play football and pretend to care about the world academia has all too successfully whitewashed anyway. (Maybe he’ll end up back on the plantation selling crack, if he’s lucky enough.)’

There’s a war on our youth. And as I sit amongst my blissfully ignorant white classmates (lucky them), I wonder how loud I’ll have to blast my Janis Joplin and TLC for the next soldier to strike.

Nazareth Hagood