Opinion: America, not Mississippi

This commentary is in response to an Aug. 6, 2026, opinion piece.

My son turned 12 today.

Twelve.

The same age as Tamir Rice when he was shot by police while playing with a toy gun.

My Honor was born during the summer of Ferguson. I wanted to disappear into the soft things of new motherhood. Diapers and onesies. ABCs and tiny fingers and toes. I wanted to nurse my baby, breathe him in and pretend the world outside our little sanctuary could wait.

But another mother’s brown son lay dead in a Missouri street.

So, alongside lullabies came another lesson.

The Talk.

It is a conversation Black folks have been having with our children their entire lives.

And the country keeps giving us new material.

Keep your hands visible. Be mindful of your movements. Know where you are. Know who is around you. Understand that sometimes your Blackness will enter the room before your humanity is allowed through the door.

I know something about inheritance.

I was raised in Mississippi.

My grandmother heard the screams of Bootjack McDaniels as he was lynched yards from her home. At eight years old, I learned the power of a white woman’s tears. As a teenager, I watched trucks carrying guns and Confederate flags pull into our driveway.

This soil holds blood.

Mississippi has earned its scars.

But somewhere along the way, America became comfortable pretending the wound belonged only to us.

Racism became Southern. Mississippi became shorthand for America’s sins—cotton fields and Confederate flags, burning crosses and Black bodies swinging from trees.

Point South and everybody else gets to feel clean.

Except Ferguson isn’t in Mississippi.

Tamir Rice wasn’t killed in Mississippi.

George Floyd wasn’t murdered in Mississippi.

And Donald Trump ain’t just president of Mississippi.

White supremacy has never respected state lines.

That truth sits heavy as unanswered questions remain around the death of Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old Black Mississippian who left for Horn Island on the Fourth of July and never came home.

I don’t know what happened to Nolan.

I won’t pretend that I do.

But I know The Talk.

I’ve been preparing my son for it since he was small enough to nurse. Years ago, I wrote that after teaching Honor his ABCs, there would come a time when I would have to teach him how to live. No realistic-looking water guns in public. Keep identification with you. Be mindful of what you wear. Keep your hands visible when stopped by police.

Today he is twelve.

And I hate that 12 means something different to me because Tamir never got to be 13.

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong parents to do all the talking.

Black children already know they are Black.

What if white children were taught what it means to be white in America? What if they learned the history beneath their feet, the inheritance waiting for them and their power to refuse the ugliest parts of it?

Our children inherit more than our eyes, noses and smiles.

They inherit our stories.

Our wounds.

Our lies.

Our silences.

I wish I could point beyond Mississippi and tell my son there is some place where this history cannot reach him.

There isn’t.

The Talk was never about surviving the South.

It’s about surviving America.

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Image courtesy Talamieka Brice