I turn on the news, my fingers trembling and my heart beat pounding inside my ears. Another death. Another ‘one of us’ as a statistic. Another victim of a racist and cruel police violence. Another Black Man dead, my dad says as he shakes his head with disappointment. Unanimous gasps echo through our living room, as our family becomes witnesses of a man being choked to death on live TV.
“I can’t breathe.” “I can’t breathe.” “I can’t breathe.”
How many times do those three painful, agonizing words have to be forced out from a human being to receive contrition? Wat justice is found in the murder of a 12-year-old boy, mistakenly targeted, because he had a BB gun in his hands? How can a mother and her child walk through the enraged streets of Missouri, Ferguson when a body lays soaked in blood for hours?
The deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, respectfully, left behind a nasty burn that is still slowly healing for the Black Community. The tragic deaths seemingly blocked what many African Americans were so thirsty for – a mark of progress. That introduces this burning question: have we made
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For instance, other players followed into San Francisco 49ers Colin Kapernick after he sank to the ground during the entire national anthem. He declared his reasoning behind protesting a “country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Perhaps the act of kneeling down while the national anthem play son live TV infuriates many, but sometimes the voice of a public figure is the voice of millions of obscure Americans. To emphasize, watching Kapernick initiate a form of civil disobedience allowed me to have a sense of ‘being heard’ or even better – understood. I was grateful to find someone who had the courage to share my, as well as many others’, frustrations of brutal police violence and other racial disparities toward African