In America right now there are a lot of voices that wish to divide us. There are a lot of voices that wish to confuse the issues at hand to make it seem like we are farther apart than we are.

Then there are voices that cut through all of that.

This week’s Maine Sunday Telegram featured the words of Maine mothers and fathers who are raising black children at a time when blindness toward the black experience, here and across the country, is helping to perpetuate a racist system.

And we can’t expect to end or even diminish that racist system if we don’t accept how it affects individual black lives, and how it treats those lives differently than others.

All parents recognize the trepidation that comes with sending one’s children out into the world.

However, relatively few Maine parents know what it’s like to worry that your kids will be caught under the weight of systemic racism and police brutality. Those parents are not allowed to forget it – not for one second. It has always been a part of their lives.

Carl Smith of Saco said he gives his twin sons the same speech he heard from his father. He tells them that even if they are upstanding young men, police officers may not see them that way. He makes sure there is nothing wrong with their car, so that a broken taillight won’t be used as a pretext for a stop by law enforcement. He explains to their white friends how his sons could be implicated by their actions.

From left, Drew Smith, Carl Smith and Dylan Smith. Carl Smith tells his sons that even if they are upstanding young men, police officers may not see them that way. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

“If something happens,” he told the Press Herald, “(my boys are) the first ones to be asked questions. They’re the first ones that are going to be looked at.”

As a child, Portland resident Rachel Gloria Adams was one of just a few black girls at her school in Concord, Massachusetts. Now her daughters are growing up in a similar position in Maine. The problems with race in our country, which have become so clear to so many over the past week, are just part of her lived experience.

“Our parents dealt with the same things that we’re dealing with, and their parents dealt with it too,” she told the Press Herald.

Andrea Jackson, a white woman who grew up in South Portland, married a black man and is raising a family in that city, said she has told her black sons that many police officers act with integrity. Still, she says, she recently reminded them that they may be perceived differently from their white peers.

“If I’m out at 15 or 16 years old riding around South Portland, police looked at me as somebody they had to protect,” she told her son. “They’re not going to look at you that way.”

Those are the words of parents who just want their kids to be safe, to be treated fairly, and to be given the shot at a full life that they deserve.

Those are words we all can relate to, and we should put them front and center as we move forward to reform the oppressive systems and institutions that have made them necessary.