I’m utterly confused. I’m confused as to why we are discussing adequate protest strategy instead of the death of an unarmed black teenager. I’m confused as to why I’ve heard more about the feelings of upset naked students instead of a black man being killed on camera only to have his murderer walk away without a trial. I’m confused as to why the only morally reprehensible issue related to Ferguson that my ethical reasoning course addressed in our take home final was the uneconomical riots.
I must be missing something or we have all just somehow found a way to ignore the real issues of systematic oppression and racial inequality that are the root causes of the tragedies that have occurred not only over the past few weeks, but also over the last 400 years. Instead, I’ve found myself apologizing for a “poorly organized” protest and defending a community’s right to civil disobedience in cases of extreme injustice.
For once, why can’t we talk about what’s actually morally reprehensible? For example, the death of a black man at the hands of police, security guards and other vigilantes occurs every 28 hours. Also, black men are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than are their white counterparts. We can even talk about what happens to black people who interact with the police and fortunately don’t get killed. Black individuals are four times more likely to be arrested than whites, receive sentences for drug charges that are about 13 percent longer, and one in three black men will be arrested in their lifetime.
Still not convinced that there are bigger issues at hand than which methods of protests that are most convenient and acceptable? How about racial disparity in regards to economic mobility—the unemployment rate for African Americans is twice that of whites, which has consistently been the case since the 1960s. What about healthcare inequities? African Americans are 55 percent more likely to be uninsured than whites, and consequently have the highest mortality rate for most major chronic diseases.
These issues that are literally killing people are what we should be grappling with in our conversations. It’s disturbing how discussions about race so quickly become diluted, reconstructed, and manipulated into something that is easier to talk about and digest. Just because it is scary to fathom that individuals are being murdered because of the color of their skin or how our own personal prejudices may be contributing to the problem, does not mean we change the subject and move on to something more comfortable to discuss. It means that we stand up and fight injustice and it means that we call it what it is—racism, oppression, persecution.
I’m done being confused. Let’s talk about what matters.