I’ve been battling writer’s block this month. Typically, I’m ready and raring to go for these monthly updates. It’s not that there isn’t anything to talk about…there is. Too much, in fact.

In these moments, children usually get it right. A few weeks ago, my six-year-old wanted to know where Bolivia was since a friend from school talked about his family living there. Nonchalantly she said, “I think his mommy and daddy came to Kansas City because people were getting killed in Bolivia.”

She doesn’t know the word “refugee,” nor does she really even know what’s happening in other countries. She does, though, hear what we say — and pick up more than we give her credit for. She understands, better than many adults, that people want to be safe, loved, and live in peace.

For Black, brown, immigrant, refugee, and non-white families, that’s harder to imagine in the U.S. In fact, any kind of different is treated as bad, ugly, a threat, and reason for discrimination and hatred.

Inspired by Reshma Saujani’s commencement speech, let’s think about our differences, differently. Excellence requires difference.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Bryan Steven’s Just Mercy book. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) that he founded published a report about racial bias in wrongful death convictions. Across the U.S., for every eight people executed, one has been found innocent. That kind of “success” rate is appalling in every sense of the word and wouldn’t be tolerated for most situations especially when life is on the line.

Increasing the diversity of juries — which we’ve interpreted in the sixth amendment of the U.S. Constitution to mean a “jury of their peers” — is one way to reduce the risk of wrongful convictions. Yet, diverse juries are rare even in death penalty cases, and, in Alabama, the report found the exclusion of Black people from jury service to be widespread.