Scenes of an almost exclusively white, heavily-armed police force shooting tear gas into a mostly black group of civilians should be a page out of a dark chapter in the Civil Rights Movement two generations ago. Instead, it is an all too real contemporary reality.
On Aug. 9, the unarmed Michael Brown was shot by a police officer and on Aug. 5 John Crawford III was shot in an Ohio Walmart while holding an air rifle.
Protests, riots, looting and call-to-actions have taken place since. Former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, reverend Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey and President Barack Obama all have weighed in.
Perhaps Republican Senator Rand Paul said it best an article in Time
Magazine that African Americans feel the government is targeting them.
Racism is a sticky situation. Personally, I come from all the benefits that accompany white privilege and being a member of the elite.
However, ours is not a country exclusively for the select few. We are the “melting pot” and home of the “American Dream,” where the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality still persists. Yes, we did elect an African American president but if the events of the last three weeks have shown us anything, it is that ethnicity is still an obstacle to our national dream.
It is heartbreaking that almost half a century after Martian Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, after Rosa Parks and after the Civil Rights Act, American racial profiling and racism are still alive and well. What does it say if an unarmed, black teenager is shot for wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag of Skittles or if someone is shot for looking at an air rifle in a store? Being black is not a crime. Being poor is not a crime. There is no reason to shoot someone in a position of surrender.
I may never be stopped by police because of the color of my skin, but that does not mean that I am given a free pass to turn a blind eye to the recent protests and murders of African-Americans. Our own university has the unpleasant tie to the Black 14 incident, where football players were kicked off the team for wearing armbands to protest a game with rival BYU.
Many have called for nonviolent protests. Do not let the call go unanswered. The recent tragedies bring up many unpleasant conversations, but we need to have them now more than ever.
