The only colors that penetrate those dark memories are the blue and red lights of police vehicles parked on every other street corner, swirling all night long.

My mind had become monochromatic and plagued by a single question: Why was it so hard to have a good life as a black person in America?

The unfair banking practices that prevented black homeownership in the suburbs and the gentrification that reclaimed black cities for white people.

Images of lifeless black bodies, casualties of war: black men and women hanging from trees; Emmett Till’s battered face; Martin Luther King lying in a pool of blood, his face half-covered by a white cloth; Malcolm X, mouth agape, dead on a stretcher.

America denies so many black people basic security, freedom and human dignity.