I am a young, white man and my parents never had to talk with me about how to interact with the police, and if you're white too, then neither did yours. I'm not talking about always keeping your license in your car and knowing where your pink slips are in case you get pulled over. Everyone had that discussion when they were 16. I'm talking about how not to get yourself arrested or killed while interacting with the police.

White parents don't have to tell their kids not to wear a hoodie while walking home at night, or not to stare too long at a police officer. White parents don't have to tell their kids not to play ding-dong-ditch, not to run in residential neighborhoods, or pretend to shoot a gun when playing outside with their friends. White parents don't have to tell their children not to make sudden movements in front of the police or stay inside of a clothing store too long for fear of being accused of shoplifting.

My parents never had to say those things to me and neither do any other white parents. Why? Because, as a white person, you are afforded the benefit of the doubt. You are not perceived by society to be inherently criminal. When your white son is playing ding-dong-ditch with his friends at night and he runs away from the door, what are the odds that neighbor calls the police? If a group of black kids play ding-dong-ditch and they are seen running away from the door, do the odds of a neighbor calling the police increase? You bet they do. If your white son walks home with a hoodie on do you think he has a risk of being killed for looking "suspicious?" What if your white son is pulled over and asked to present his license and registration? Do you think that within the five or six seconds it takes him to take out his wallet, he could be killed because the officer thought he reached for it too quickly and had a gun? I would imagine that you don't. Unfortunately, the worst part about those last three scenarios is that they actually happened to people of color.

Do black parents have this discussion because they think all police officers are actively hunting down and killing black people? No. Absolutely not. They do it purely out of caution and a rational understanding that, because they are black, they do not always get the benefit of the doubt when encountering the police and that, given the long history of institutionalized racism in America, they are far more likely to be oppressed by the system than their fellow white Americans.

The issue of racism in police departments and the criminal justice system as a whole is very real. After an Investigation by the DOJ in 2015, the police department of Ferguson, Missouri was found to be engaging in a massive amount of racial profiling and harassment of its black population, as was the police department of Baltimore, Maryland in August of 2016. According to studies done by the Sentencing Project, the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, and the Department of Justice, if you're black you have a 1 in 3 chance of being arrested in your lifetime, for whites it's 1 in 17. If you're black you are four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than a white person even though blacks and whites use it at the same rate and whites are more likely to possess it. If you're black you also receive 20% longer sentences than a white person who committed the same crime, and you're three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person. These findings helped to confirm what communities of color had been saying for decades, and they help shed light on why parents of color have very serious discussions with their children about interacting with police officers.

The rallying cry for justice and equality and an end to racism has been "Black Lives Matter." Yet, despite all of the evidence of racial bias, harassment, and injustice towards people of color at the hands of police and the system, there are still white people who come out in droves to cry "all lives matter." That's like going to a fundraiser for breast cancer victims and yelling "what about colon cancer!" The last time I checked the phrase was Black Lives Matter, not Black Lives Matter more. When you say "all lives matter" in response to someone saying that black lives matter, you are part of the problem. Saying "all lives matter," as "Real Time" host Bill Maher once put it, implies that all lives are equally at risk. They are not.

It is time to listen to people of color in America and understand that our criminal justice system is far from perfect. It is time to understand that being white in America has benefits not afforded to people of color.