This need for remembering that we are individuals, not a composite of a whole race, is essential. Too often, we allow ourselves to be defined by stereotypes that lack a connection unless we embrace them in our own thinking and actions.

Many minority groups are discouraged from giving back to their communities because escape is a survival reality. Returning is not deemed an honorable option when it equates to demise of the body.

Many minority groups are discouraged from giving back to their communities because escape is a survival reality. Returning is not deemed an honorable option when it equates to demise of the body.

These clothes often are stereotypes of urban bodies for black youth. In contrast, I would say that the opposite response of polo shirts, bow ties, and conforming attire that many black boys wear in an effort to fit in with the dominant culture--through assimilation--is also a form of fear.

Is the answer undefined because respect for our common humanity has no specific path? Each person must find his or her own terms of connection with every individual since we combat tendencies in varied ways when we encounter our differences.

Perhaps, when we struggle to define difference as either weakness or strength, we open the door for the challenge of racism and other social inequities. Perhaps difference, when counted as a necessary glue--a common bond--to elevate humans to being more collectively than who we are individually, is what we grapple with because we see it as isolating when we should see it as our hope for attaining our greatest human character once we see difference as a function of our collective wealth--our interdependence on each other--rather than our independence to stand in contrast to one another.

legacy = heritage = systemic inequity = cloaked hoods reminiscent of the hoods worn by KKK and their ideological superiority

I am hesitant to place this broad sense of authority on the police department. I do not think it is a department; instead, I believe it to be people cloaked in masks of justice Some believe in a false image of of others based on color: they see color and not a person, an image and not a heart, a stereotype and not a son or a daughter.

When the person in uniform starts seeing problems and not people, they take on the systemic, divisive heritage of inequity that manifests itself in racists, sexists, social hierarchies that destroy the humanity in all of us.

If a people's wealth, being, or privilege is based on standing on the backs of others, the struggle or jeopardy of the situation is that they are living on uncertain time--a time that will disappear once those who are on their backs eventually stand straight. For those who stand on the backs of others, they have not known true work for what they have attained since they have not earned what they have by their own efforts--at least not on the basis of their own grit and determination that emerged from their personal character of inner strength and resilience. They must live lives continually wondering when the dream will end, when the property will be returned to those who have rightfully fought for what is in the hands of a usurping group.

A usurped dream is a delusion, a farce, a hoax, that survives on borrowed time, terms, and values. For those who benefit from its ongoing perpetuation, the dream is more of a pending nightmare.