Why do I have to be another statistic?
Why do I have to watch where I jog at night?
Why do my colleagues assume I'm not as smart as them in class?
Why do I have to listen to rap? Why can't I listen to rock n' roll or pop?
Why do I have to make sure I don't look suspicious at night so the damn cops don't drive along side me as I walk?
Why do I have to be okay with my mom telling me to “not look suspicious” as I walk into clothing stores?
Why do I have to be okay with the racial epithets the people around me use willy-nilly?
Why do I have to get searched by the goddamn TSA just for having darker skin, facial hair and a long and foreign last name?
Why do I have to play football and basketball and not hockey or lacrosse?
Why shouldn't Tray'von of worn a hood? Because he looked suspicious?
Why can't I stand on a street corner at night?
Why should I be okay with people assuming I like fried chicken and kool-aid?
Why do I have to own a pair of Jordans?
Why do I have to be okay with being stopped-and-frisked in the state of NY?
Why do people choose not to sit next to me on the metro?
Why do rappers get called “misogynistic, drug-glorifying menaces to society” while rock n' roll artists get immortalized as gods?
Why do I feel like a stranger in my AP classes when I'm surrounded by white faces?
Why did my dad get called a nigger in front of his children?
Why was Malcolm X a “radical militant” and Patrick Henry a hero? Did they not stand for the same thing? Did Patrick Henry and his colleagues not go to war for their freedom? Is Malcolm X calling for freedom by “any means necessary” not the same as “give me liberty or give me death? Or is freedom and the methods you get it with dependent on skin?
Didn’t the Black Panthers have the same reason to rebel as the Sons of Liberty?
Why did we have to wait 251 years to be able to vote? Why did we have to wait 244 years to be be considered free? Why did we have to wait 345 years to be able to able to use the same goddamn water fountain as Caucasians?
Why did Obama have to show his birth certificate? Why did it matter if Obama was admitted into college with Affirmative Action?
Why does the color of my skin define me for the rest of my life? Why does it even matter, are we all not human?
How can this be the land of the free when it was built on the backs of the enslaved?

The reason? I'm black, that's why.