The Talk

At a young age, kids start noticing the differences between themselves and others. When I began noticing them, my parents sat me down to talk – something they almost never did. That’s how I knew it mattered. They never let me forget the things they told me, especially when they were important. After that talk, I started seeing things I never paid attention to before. On random mornings on the way to school, my mom would repeat their words. If I was going to a birthday party, she’d say them again. If my dad walked me to the store, he repeated them too. They said the same lines over and over.

My parents told me when I was very young, “You are smart, kind, confident, and brave, and no one can take that away from you. You’re different—your personality is different, your hair, and most importantly, your skin is different. Those differences don’t make you any less important. In this world, you’re going to have to try twice as hard to get halfway there. It isn’t right, but that’s how the world works. Don’t let anyone bully you for something you can’t control – how you look or your circumstances. People will make assumptions about you just because of the way you look, so don’t give them a reason to think you’re a bad person.”

I think they repeated these things more than other parents because they were sending me to a predominantly white school. In my grade, there were only seven Black kids, and I was the only Afro-Latina out of fifty-five students. They made sure I never thought less of myself because of the way I looked and they still tell me the same things today.

I treat the janitor with the same respect I give the head of school. I say hello to the security guards when I walk in. I talk to the chefs. I talk to the kids with special needs. I never judge someone for still learning. I do the things other people overlook because they don’t think those moments matter. I do them because of what my parents taught me. The fact that someone isn’t a teacher, or is an immigrant whose English isn’t perfect, or has a different kind of brain than I do, doesn’t mean they deserve anything less. Everyone deserves kindness, respect, and a real conversation. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized not everyone grows up with those values.

My mother and father sat me down again after we watched a movie about police brutality. They taught me about Martin Luther King Jr., Emmett Till, and the people who died at the hands of those meant to protect them. They explained racism, injustice, and inequality and how those things affected people who weren’t white. 

I was ten on May 25, 2020—the day George Floyd died. My parents taught me about police brutality, but I never lived through it in real time. I came home from school to my parents talking about what happened, and they sat my sister and I down again. They told us people would probably talk about it at school, and that’s when the talk began. My parents told me, “If a cop stops you on the street, you listen. You tell them your name and age and do exactly what they say. If your hands are in your pockets, take them out slowly. Don’t get smart with them. Don’t be rude. Ask for us, and don’t say anything else because they can use that against you even when you did nothing wrong.” The last thing my mother said was, “Don’t watch the video.” When I asked her why, she told me it was too violent for a child to watch. That was the moment that everything shifted for me. It was the first time I understood that police brutality wasn’t something from long ago—it could happen now, in my lifetime, even to me. I was only ten years old. 

A few days later at school, we had a conversation about what happened to George Floyd. All I remember is that none of my classmates understood what my Black friends and I were feeling. Not one person in that room—not even an adult—spoke up for us when the white kids said that Black lives weren’t the only ones that mattered. We were in fourth grade. We were still in elementary school.

After that week, I started looking at cops differently—in the same way I still look at them now. I look at them with fear instead of trust, with alertness instead of ease. I watch their next move. I feel a nervousness that never shows on my face but sits heavy inside me.

A few days ago, I was walking home from the bus stop with my headphones on. It was dark and the street was almost empty. I saw a police officer standing alone. I gave him the same look I always do, and as I got closer, a biker rode past both of us. The bike was slow enough for the officer to call him over. I couldn’t fully hear the cop’s words, but I saw his gestures. I walked to the corner and slid one headphone off—close enough to see and hear, far enough to not be noticed. The interaction ended quickly, and the biker rode off. 

I froze because the biker was Black and didn’t seem to speak English well. I wanted to see what the cop would do—would he accuse him of something? Would he arrest him for no reason? Or was he simply asking a harmless question? I’m grateful the officer was just asking him something simple, but I hate that my first instinct was fear. I stayed because I wanted to be a witness in case something happened and there was no one there to help prove it. I knew that if things went wrong, something could happen to me too. But honestly, I would rather risk something happening to me than leave that man alone with no one to stand by him.

White people often don’t recognize their privilege. The privilege of having better resources and opportunities. The privilege of having the talk be about sex instead of the possibility of a police officer ending their life. The privilege of being outside after dark without worry or the freedom from thinking about ICE agents in broad daylight. The privilege of not having to work twice as hard just to get half as far. The privilege of making a million mistakes without those mistakes defining their entire future. The privilege of not having to think about racism, injustice, or inequality every single day.

I’m sixteen years old, and these thoughts sit with me constantly. My white peers don’t carry this weight because it doesn’t affect them—not until suddenly it does affect them.

The talk my parents gave me—the talk almost every immigrant or Black parent gives their child—changed me in a way that won’t ever fade. It didn’t hurt me; it shaped me. It made me more aware of how I move through the world. It made me care deeply about politics, injustice, diversity, and the lives of people who are treated as less than. The values my parents drilled into me weren’t just to make me a good person. They were to prepare me for the world I was going to grow up in.