On August 9, 2014, I sat in the back seat of my mom’s car. We had just picked my sister up from her friend’s house. I looked down at my phone at a text a close friend had sent me: “My friend was shot today and the police just left him in the street for hours.”
Later in the evening every electronic device exploded with flashing lights, sirens, and headlines about riots. Ferguson was across the Missouri River from my home, but that night it felt like everything was happening in my backyard. In the following days, national news stations portrayed North St. Louis as a war zone. Reporters continuously saying “Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year-old black male, shot multiple times.”
This had been the first time i’d ever witnessed real racial tension in my life. My neighborhood, in St. Charles, was mostly white. I grew up going to a school so north that the campus lied between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. A small, mostly white, farm school essentially. People wore confederate flags as a badge of honor. Never in my life did I have a teacher that wasn’t white. This was just normal to me until what happened in Ferguson was exposed. Suddenly I became aware that my reality wasn’t everyone’s reality: The incident in Ferguson brought light to the fact that Americans that are not white makeup less than 38% of the US’s population, and yet minorities are about two-thirds of the unarmed individuals killed by police.
The fact of the matter is, as a white individual, I will never know the prejudice that minorities feel. I certainly won’t ever know what it’s like to be a black individual in the United States. As much as I can sympathize and try to understand, I will never have the target on my back that black americans have.
The NAACP reports that black males are six times as likely to be incarcerated as whites. How is it possible that minorities make up the majority of those in prison? No, the answer is not “minorities break the law more” because statistically speaking, they don’t. 14 million whites are drug users, while only 2.6 million black Americans are drug users. Once again, this is disproportionately represented in our criminal justice system, as black Americans are sent to prison for drug offences at ten times the rate as white Americans. And If you are a black american in prison for a nonviolent offence, good luck getting out - because on average you’ll serve almost as much time for that as a white american will serve for a violent offence (58.7 months compared to 61.7 months). Long story short, The United States may be the land of the free for white people, but it certainly isn’t for anyone else. Our criminal justice system is virtually telling America as a whole “Yeah, you people are worse, and you deserve worse.” Because of this, when black people make strides towards equality, white people as a whole view this as over sensitivity and angry black people who are criminals.
This is why the Black Lives Matter movement is so incredibly important. It was started by three black women after the shooting of Trayvon Martin occurred. The movement quickly gained popularity around the country as protest signs and trending hashtags on social media. Black people want their pain to be felt, and their voices to be heard which is nothing new. Before mass incarceration and police brutality became the modern day trend in racism, slavery existed, Jim Crow laws existed, lynching existed, and segregation existed. However, it is evident that white people didn’t listen to black people because if they did, many of the previous statistics would probably be a lot more proportionate. So the question is, who do the people in power, white people, listen to? That’s right: Other white people. This thought in itself is unfair, but it’s the truth - and therefore it is the job of the majority who created the problem of racism to fix it.
As white individuals, we have privilege. We were simply born with it because of the way our schools focus on Eurocentric history and our media desires Eurocentric beauty. We can’t control the privilege that comes with our skin color, but we can use it to assist in mending our twisted society. By recognizing that we have privilege and supporting movements such as Black Lives Matter, we can attempt to bridge the gap that centuries of oppression has created. This does not mean all white people are actively racist, but by standing on the sidelines and not helping those who cannot help themselves, we are being racist. It is not up to black people to fight for the world to recognize their struggles, it should be something the white majority cared about in the first place.
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