"She’s Gonna Be Somebody, Instead of Somebody’s Baby-Mama…"

This was Dave from De La Soul, a few years ago thinking out loud about mortality, redemption, maturity and yes, fatherhood. “Trying People” has been in regular rotation since the fall of 2001 when I first heard it, in part because it’s a great song—De La samples Laura Nyro’s “Blackpatch”—and because it was reflective of some of the very issues I was facing as a then-thirty something black man struggling with his own mortality and legacy and the challenges of helping to raise two daughters—two little black girls—in a society that rarely takes the welfare of those who look like them seriously.

There’s rarely a day when I am not crushed by the thought that my life partner and I won’t be able to do all that we can do to prepare our “whurl-a-girls” for the world they will have to navigate. The same world that sucked the life from 15-year old Sakia Gunn, who is memorialized by Kim Pearson (Professor Kim) on this, the third anniversary of Gunn’s murder—the same world which forced Aishah Shahidah Simmons to give voice to those black women and girls who have been and will be subjected to sexual violence at the hands of, not some so-called privileged white male athletes, but black men who those women and girls called “brother”, “friend”, “lover” and even “daddy”. But when I read about a public sexual attack on a black female 2nd-grader, at the hands of a dozen of her male classmates, I’m afraid I’m at wit's end.

Schoolyard Attack on Second-Grade Girl by 12 Boys Sparks Ire and Concern

Aishah Shahidah Simmons: Words on the Duke Rape Case

Sakia Gunn: Three years on, a few still remember