One of the most intriguing aspects of being black today is sanity.

How can an individual living in such desperate times exist alongside insane denial of said existence?

How does one remain sane in an insane world?

One that denies we matter?

At the start of my new school in the second grade, my new teacher gave me a nickname.

No one can say your name, she explained, so she’d call me by my initials, DK.

And that’s how things remained for years.

I grew to love that teacher and my classmates, many of whom studied with me until graduation 11 years later.

Needless to say, our small class got to know one another really well.

It’s that knowing of others that I draw upon now to stay sane.

See, I know white people.

I’ve grown up in a diverse world, one where all our differences were brought to light and respected.

I learned that my teacher – then a middle-aged, middle-class white woman- had marched alongside Dr. King in all his major marches for his struggle for Civil Rights.

I knew Jewish kids who I learned were seen as outsiders like me.

I learned that Catholics were marginalized in our city, despite being the largest health care providers.

I learned that the poor white kids where, too, regarded as others.

I saw that not all the black kids could escape.

I learned that despite the school’s efforts at integration, life would segregate us then and now.

As soon as the last bell rang, race and class separated us once again.

We all went to our respective neighbourhoods,

And have largely remained in our respective places as adults.

Now, I as an adult, I am ‘diversity’.

I accepted that you can never judge a book by its cover.

See, in my state, the rural areas are generally considered backwards- and this is taught to us city kids as a fact.

We even had a biology teacher in high school who told us that she’d taught in the hills of Kentucky and the people were in fact born stupid…damaged by oxygen deprivation.

I listened to what was said about ‘them’

But what I heard was the same shit that had been said about us.

No, it didn’t destroy my ability to trust white people,

But it did give me pause for thought:

How is it that ‘they’ could arrive at respect for my people, but then turn around and diss others who are struggling?

This was all just one more piece of the puzzle I was putting together to help me understand society’s cruelty towards me as a kid.

Why did I grow up in total fear of how strangers would react to me?

It’s like a sixth sense that I honed and developed throughout my life- this is one of the many benefits of being a minority.

But tis sixth sense suggests that we live in a world that is largely unsafe for people like me.

That’s the burden I’d like to ease for those who come after me.

I want to develop the implicit assumption that Black Lives Matter.

Unquestionably, unapologetically and unconditionally.

Blackness is no excuse, nor whiteness.

Racism erodes empathy.

That’s insane.