Miles, a black 13-year-old boy, was walking with a white girl when she told him, "Oh, let's cross the street, there's a group of black kids, I don't want to run into them."
Marvin, a 25-year-old black man, recalls the time a teacher told him to take off a sweatband because it "looks gang-affiliated."
These are the types of racist encounters black boys and men face every day across the US, as documented in the great video above by the New York Times's Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz.
The personal stories are particularly timely as the US struggles with racial disparities in police use of force and the criminal justice system as a whole. Over the past year, the high-profile police killings of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Garner in New York City, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, among many others, have put these issues at the forefront of media coverage and political battles.
"Every time we're killed, the first thing you see on the news is, oh, criminal record or something like that," Jumoke, a 17-year-old black teen, said. "From the second the bullet hits us, already we're starting to be dehumanized."
Some of the interviewees acknowledged the realities of racism, saying they have to adapt. Malik, a 17-year-old black teen, explained, "Black people, like myself, we don't get as many chances as they do. So you have to be aware, and you have to watch out, and you can't mess up."
Others just asked for people to be more understanding.
"I want people to know that I'm perfectly fine," Maddox, a 10-year-old black boy, said, "and I'm not going to hurt anybody or do anything bad."
Watch the video above and check out the New York Times's full package on this issue.
