Story highlights Issac Bailey: 4-year-old girl's cautioning of mother after Castile shooting is tragic, turned-on-its-head version of "the Talk"

He says girl's pleading was logical end to "respectability politics" pressed upon blacks even though it will not keep them safe

Issac Bailey has been a journalist in South Carolina for two decades and was most recently the primary columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach. He was a 2014 Harvard University Nieman fellow. Follow him on Twitter: @ijbailey. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) A four-year-old girl was left to protect her mother in the only way she knew how: by telling her mom to be just a little more perfect, a survival tactic many black parents have felt forced to teach their children in an America in which dark skin is still too frequently seen as threatening.

Issac Bailey

"Mom, please stop cussing and screaming 'cause I don't want you to get shooted," the little girl told her mother , Diamond Reynolds, a woman who had just seen her boyfriend, Philando Castile, killed for no good reason.

The little girl's pleading is the logical end to a respectability politics impressed upon black people even though it will never keep us safe. Black people have been told, repeatedly and over centuries, that if we are just a little better, dress a little better, study a little harder, be a bit more compliant and adopt more middle-class white values, we will be allowed to keep breathing.

Under no circumstances should we scare white people or make them, or others in positions of power, uncomfortable -- because it would be unfair to those powerful people.

It's why so many black parents have stressed to their children to make sure their hands are on the steering wheel, to remember to say yes sir and yes ma'am -- just as Castile did before he was shot and Reynolds did as her boyfriend bled to death -- to make no sudden movements, to make eye contact only if the officer wants them to make eye contact. Don't worry about your supposedly constitutionally-protected rights, just survive, these parents have preached.