Black mothers have always been the backbone of societal pain. We're beyond tired — it's time for others to stand for us.

• Imani Bashir is a writer, world traveler, and mother of a 3-year-old son who says that anxiety for her Black son's safety pervades the typical joys of motherhood.
• Systemic racism has created an inheritance of trauma for Black women, she writes — and that's been apparent in this country since the days of slavery.
• "When I became pregnant in 2016, I knew that my life would never be the same... I was now put in the position to not fully hope for the best, but plan to prepare for the worst."
• She calls upon other groups who are bearing witness to this pain to step up and help fix the problems that Black women having been fighting alone for generations.

"Mama, mama, I'm through!" Words that in his last breaths, George Floyd, an innocent man who was murdered by police of the Minneapolis Police Department, was just able to muster.

Although his mother has been deceased for the past two years, as a Black woman and mother myself, I understood his call.

In his time of pain and suffering, his last seconds of life were met with his first knowledge of comfort — his mother. In the same breath, he was letting her know that he was indeed tired and ready to meet her on the other side.

To be tired as a Black mother is something we know very well. It is not a badge of honor, nor the perfect rite of passage — but its existence has been apparent in this country since the days of slavery.

During slavery, Black women were used as breeding machines to continuously have babies that would eventually be born into slavery and also enter into a life of servitude to the masters and their families. Their babies were readily ripped from their palms, while they were forced to breastfeed and care for the slave master's children versus their own. Black women were also repeatedly subjected to experimental medical practices to test their threshold of pain without the use of proper medicine and often to the detriment of their bodies.

Essentially, systemic racism also proved a testament to the blatant disregard that Black women could even endure any sort of physical, emotional, or spiritual pain. The labor that we have inherited is that of trauma and burden, outside of the sheer agony that one day our children will be ripped from us through servitude of prison or death by the hands of racism.

When I became pregnant in 2016, I knew that my life would never be the same. Yes, there is an indescribable joy and pride that exists from entering motherhood, but also the extreme anxiety of having to focus on the reality that Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Trayvon Martin were all Black children with mothers who loved them dearly. I was now put in the position to not fully hope for the best, but plan to prepare for the worst.

Imagine that when my child picks up a toy gun, I have to immediately redirect him to some other toy because as a Black child, he will somehow be seen as a threat, like 12-year-old Tamir Rice. And although my son loves sirens and lights on police cars, I will one day have to sit him down to explain that those same sirens and lights will cause an unexplainable nervousness in the pit of his stomach even if he never did anything wrong. Furthermore, I will have the generational "sit down" and conversation that says the civil servants hired to protect us, will more than likely be his first experiences with having a gun pulled on him, harassment, assault, or even being killed.

No one offers a rule book on how to navigate a nation that's one-sided without the full support of the world around them. As a mother, I can tell my son all of the performative things that are supposed to show him as non-threatening, but if statistically Black children are seen as much older, mature, and more menacing than white children, how much of a chance does he really have at surviving?

The burden of being a Black mother filled with anxiety, angst, and pain only appears to circumnavigate within the Black community. As we continue to visually see injustices that result in a continued blow to Black mothers who have used every bit of their breath to ensure their children can keep theirs, it's now beyond us to continue to carry the weight. It's past time for the multitude of other ethnic groups to stand with us and be willing to show solidarity in the form of actively working to dismantle racism and racist systems.

When Mamie Till decided to have an open casket for her son Emmett, she proved a point that people miss to this very day. Her 14-year-old son Emmett was brutally murdered due to a white woman concocting a lie stating that he had inappropriately whistled at her. This lie, which she confessed 6-decades later, resulted in Emmett being beaten, mutilated, and shot in the head prior to a metal fan being tied around his neck and his body thrown in a river.

The open casket was not only for people to see what had been done to Mamie Till's son, but a moment in American history that showed a Black mother asking the rest of the nation, what are you going to do?

This pain and trauma does not just belong to us as Black women and mothers, and as everyone witnesses it with their eyes, it is not only a shared burden to bear, but a shared problem to be fixed.

Imani Bashir is an international writer and world traveler who focuses on identity. She can be found at @SheIsImaniB on Twitter and Instagram.