“Being a black man in America isn’t easy. The hunt is on, and you’re the prey. All I’m saying is… Survive!”

Has America evolved since those words were articulated in the landmark film “Menace II Society” more than 20 years ago? For young black men and women whose lives have been irrevocably impacted by the stain of gunpowder, the answer seems to be no.

Yes, young black men and women. The hunters have not only zeroed in on Danroy Henry, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Jonathan Ferrell, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Michael Brown and a munificent amount of African-American males whose murders have not been afforded national coverage. Renisha McBride, Marlene Pinnock, Marissa Alexander, Ersula Ore and Rosan Miller are also among the quarry that has been affected by vehemence and inequality. Our young black women need contemplation also. They are not immune from the hunt.

I have also been watched and levied as prey. However, I’ve been blessed to avoid perpetual capture. I have not even been captured temporarily. Not yet, anyway. As a young black man, I’ve enjoyed the serendipity of evading the clasps of steel bracelets around my wrists. My younger brother hasn’t been so fortunate. While driving to work during a rainy afternoon in West Baltimore last year, police officers pulled him over because the headlights on his vehicle were off. When the approaching officer ran my brother’s license, information surfaced connecting his name to felonious activity. My brother had never been arrested before this incident. After being removed from his vehicle, temporarily handcuffed and checked for gang-affiliated tattoos, he was informed that he was free to go. No further information, or even an apology for the inconvenience, was given. In light of the fate of young black people’s interaction with law enforcement, I’m thankful he was able to escape the situation still breathing.

Adding to an already frightening and humiliating situation, my brother informed me that the person whose criminal info came back with his license shared my name. Talk about serendipity.

My brother’s interaction with the police was a situation our parents prepared us for since we were adolescents. Although it has been derided, the talk about being a young black individual in America is a communal occurrence in African-American households. During a cab ride to the movies several winters ago, my father, brother and I approached a street corner brimming with several young black men who were being arrested by the police for reasons unidentified. As my brother and I stared out the window, my father forewarned us that the decisions we made as young men could be the determining factor in whether we would be able pursue our dreams or end up serving multiple-year bids behind bars. We listened intently. Unbeknown to us, being a law-abiding citizen en route to work could also result in the application of handcuffs.

This conversation with my parents didn’t end as I entered manhood. It only intensified. After a Thanksgiving expedition to New York City in 2012 to visit family, my mother and father informed me they were worried that my brother and I might have been caught in the dragnet of the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policy. This was when the practice was at its height of polarization. Thankfully we were not approached, but it was in the back of my mind as we walked towards the PathMark supermarket on 145th St. to pick up groceries for our grandmother. The NYPD officers roaming the perimeters of 7th Avenue didn’t stop us, but they were definitely watching.

Although the practice of stop-and-frisk has been gradually phased out, the NYPD is still enforcing the controversial “broken windows” policy. Conceptualized in a 1982 article in The Atlantic magazine by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, the policy of broken windows enforces a zero tolerance strategy for petty crimes. According to Wilson and Kelling’s analysis, the policing of these petty crimes are enforced to create a trickledown effect that prevents larger crimes and restores quality of life in “urban” neighborhoods. Results of the policy have been speculative. Consequently, the broken windows policy was a factor in the death of Staten Island, New York resident Eric Garner.

The death of Garner, a 43-year-old father of six who was grappled and choked to death by NYPD officers during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes on the street, sent shock waves throughout the realms of social media; so much so that filmmaker Spike Lee reached in his archives to create a poignant-but-heartbreaking visual intertwinement of Garner’s death and the fictitious death of Radio Raheem. The character Radio Raheem was the boom box-loving rabble-rouser who died at the hands of overzealous cops as the result of playing his music too loud in Lee’s seminal classic “Do The Right Thing.” The death of Radio Raheem, and the concept of Lee’s 1989 film, was inspired by the deaths of Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpers and Michael Griffith; African-Americans who were murdered in the 1980s, against the backdrop of a racially-charged New York City. Even 25 years later, some things still haven’t changed.

In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder more than two weeks ago, Ferguson, Missouri — a suburb of St. Louis — has mirrored a reiteration of parched neighborhood battlefields from former times: 1965 Watts, 1967 Newark and 1992 Los Angles initially come to mind when reviewing the social media dispatches from the scene. Brown, an 18-year-old potential college freshman, was murdered by Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson — a white, six-year veteran of a racially unbalanced police department in a historically segregated Midwestern city. According to eyewitness and friend Dorian Johnson, Brown was unarmed and his hands were raised when he was shot and left for dead after an encounter with Wilson during the afternoon of August 9. Attempting to circumvent the wrath of the suburb’s black population who began protesting the murder, Ferguson police held a press conference on August 15. During the press conference, the department released video surveillance of Brown shoving a store clerk at a local convenience store. The video’s release was followed with naming Brown as a suspect in the strong-arm robbery of the store.

These events coincided with the identification of Wilson as the officer who murdered Brown, after the department cited officer safety as the initial reason Wilson was not immediately identified. During the press conference, Ferguson police also confirmed that the alleged theft committed by Brown was unrelated to his murder, and no additional information was released regarding the roughly six shots fired into Brown. As Michael Brown’s family finally lays his body to rest, a grand jury is mulling whether to charge Wilson with a crime. According to St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch, the grand jury may not be presented all of the evidence related to the investigation until October. Darren Wilson is currently on paid administrative and has stayed out of public view. Hordes of supporters have created a counter to the protests of Brown’s murder with their own sympathetic crusade.

Although there have been varying accounts of what actually happened the day that Michael Brown was killed, the fact remains that he has joined a deplorable fraternity of black men who have been hunted down without regard. Twenty-five-year-old Kajieme Powell, an emotionally disturbed man who was shot to death by two St. Louis Metropolitan police officers, has also joined this fraternity. Powell’s killing comes approximately 10 days after the shooting of Brown and occurred less than five miles away. Whereas Jim Crow left blood-soaked black bodies dangling from trees, policies analogous to “broken windows” and “stand your ground” have left many of us dead in the street like stray animals. New era, same prey.

In light of the recent murders of young African-Americans, there are those who have marginalized the tragedies to futile innuendo. The usual suspects that continue to plague African-Americans — specifically black men — as a monolith are omnipresent: All young black men are homicidal thugs. All young black men are killing each other on a daily basis. All young black men are in need of paternal guidance. So on and so forth.

It was not the absence of a father figure that fashioned many of these young black men to be prey, as President Obama alluded to during his press conference for Michael Brown when he upheld his “My Brother’s Keeper’s” initiative. Michael Brown had a dad in his life. So did Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis. The love and protection from a present father in the lives of these young men still couldn’t save them from being hunted down. President Obama’s reluctance to assertively embark on the discussion of race is well documented. However, his public standpoint on the murder of Brown, or lack thereof, has angered many in the black community. In a recent New York Times article, acclaimed professor and social critic Michael Eric Dyson described the President’s avowal addressing the circumstances in Ferguson as “a ‘stunning epic failure’ that seemed to blame black men rather than armed police.”

Conversely, there are some who feel the President has to be careful discussing race, especially after his comments on the murder of Trayvon Martin. Noted writer Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic said as much in his 2012 article, “Fear of a Black President”:

“Before President Obama spoke, the death of Trayvon Martin was generally regarded as a national tragedy. After Obama spoke, Martin became material for an Internet vendor flogging paper gun-range targets that mimicked his hoodie and his bag of Skittles. (The vendor sold out within a week.) Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team.”

However, when there are black men being killed at a hemorrhaging velocity, the notion of politics has to be put aside.

As these myths about black men continue to be discredited, they are still doggedly enforced by some as propaganda to paint black men and women as potential threats that must be mitigated by any means. As the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown social media campaign reflected, the murder of black men is too often justified with hackneyed perceptions in the media. The fact that some of these young men and women made mistakes, and were not afforded the opportunity to learn and evolve from these mistakes, seems to negate consideration for their demise. Just as there have been residents of Ferguson causing upheaval and looting after Brown’s murder, there have been residents protesting peacefully and protecting store owners from said looters. The ongoing tragedy of losing black lives brings to light that African-Americans are not always afforded the luxury of being complex. Or even human.

The war zone footage that came from Ferguson during the initial phase of the community’s uprising reflects the way America’s local police departments have evolved from the ethos of being community-based liaisons into fully-armed militias. The images of SWAT teams dispensing canisters of tear gas into crowds of protestors was hard to distinguish from the unrest depicted in Gaza. The murder of Michael Brown has kindled a compulsory dialogue about police accountability.

Michael Bell, a white retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, was a benefactor for helping to pass legislation regarding independent reviews of police shootings in Wisconsin. Bell’s son, Michael Bell, Jr., was unarmed when he was murdered by police in Kenosha, Wis. in 2004. The police officer who killed Bell, Sr.’s son was not found guilty of any misconduct and is still working on the force. Bell shared a story of a black man coming up to him after the murder of his son and stating: “If they can shoot a white boy like a dog, imagine what we’ve been going through.”

The killing of young black people has become a recurring night terror. The question regarding the value of black life in America has been asked numerous times. As the murder of young black beings continue to accumulate, the answer to this question is becoming eerily clearer. For the sake of being redundant, I have occasionally asked myself this question. I still haven’t found an answer; however, I did partially come to a chilling perspective: I was more surprised that the murderers of Jordan Davis and Renisha McBride were actually convicted than I was when I found out that George Zimmerman was found not guilty.

In “Menace II Society,” Mr. Butler pleaded with us as young black men to survive. As I survey the landscape, survival is getting harder to come by each and every day.

Photo: Ferran Moya

Timothy Cooper is a writer and filmmaker who has contributed to several online and print publications, including The Huffington Post, BlackBook magazine, The Village Voice, Slam magazine and The Liberator magazine. Cooper and his brother, Matthew, are the founders of TheCostMag.com.