With the start of school a couple of weeks away, Calvin and I have procured most of the necessities our kids will need to begin the new year. When questions arise from the soon-to-be kindergartener and almost-third-grader, we answer what we can and remind them that, usually, behaving well and doing their best work should help them get through just fine.

Unfortunately, 17-year-old Darius’ latest questions aren’t focused on high school, fashion faux pas or cliques and cyber-bullying. His concerns focus on feeling safe, racial profiling and not becoming the latest unarmed youth to lose his life in a firestorm of gunfire and assumptions.

I’m sure by now that you’ve read of, or have heard about, the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Nearly a week ago, the Ferguson, Missouri resident was fatally shot by a police officer. Accounts differ about the exact chain of events, but according to the NY Daily News, multiple witnesses reported that Brown didn’t have a weapon, stood in the street with his hands in the air and was still shot numerous times.

After peaceful protests gave way to rioting, arrests and law enforcement armed with military equipment patrolling the streets, the FBI has taken over the investigation into Brown’s death, characterized as an ‘execution’ by community leaders, family members and friends. The Missouri State Highway Patrol was recently put in charge of security in Ferguson.

The news accounts, understandably, are disturbing to my son, especially since Michael Brown was so close to him in age. “Mom, he didn’t do anything,” Darius said when the story first broke. “What did the police shoot at him for?”

Heartsick, I could only shrug my shoulders, pondering the same painful scenario that disproportionately, time and again, ends African-American lives. We’ve all seen, or even experienced, the glaring difference of white suspects being taken into custody with minimum force applied even after brandishing weapons, threatening and/or shooting at citizens or officers (such as Colorado shooter James Holmes, Florida ‘s George Zimmerman and recently, Corinth’s own Douglas LeGuin) as dozens of black suspects, many of them unarmed, die after merely provoking suspicion of wrongdoing.

The police on Friday identified Darren Wilson as the officer involved in Brown’s shooting. The police chief also released documents that the 18-year-old was the primary suspect in a “strong-arm” robbery moments before he was killed.

People can cherry-pick each individual’s circumstances and argue them case-by-case all they want to. But what they cannot do is deny the affects of racial profiling and the lack of due process that black Americans face when they encounter law enforcement.

As members of the African-American community, we learn from our elders and teach our own children that in this country, whether or not they will encounter heightened scrutiny from police officers is not a question of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’ Centuries of negative propaganda has vilified blacks, and adding to those falsehoods the prejudicial laws that favored the white majority are what created racial profiling. So advising our sons and daughters of those warped perceptions, as well as how to navigate within them, can mean the difference failure and success— or life and death.

It’s neither an easy topic or a possibility that we want to envision for our kids, but in-between shopping trips, rides to work and spare moments in between, Calvin and I speak to Darius about institutional racism and how to behave around law enforcement. For him to realize that his guilt or innocence could be assumed based only on his skin tone signified a loathsome rite of passage that every African-American, myself included, must contemplate.

As Michael Brown’s parents seek justice and mourn their child, we as a nation have to remove the conditions that engender bigotry and racial profiling. If white suspects can consistently leave crime scenes in handcuffs rather than body bags, then that same level of humanity should also be afforded to everyone else.

Otherwise, law enforcement is being allowed to destroy communities rather than protect them. And the creed that America purports to live by— “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”— was never actually the case.