As a nation, we have gone through a lot this summer.
We’ve been greeted with the news that same-sex marriages are allowed in all 50 states. This was an amazing victory for the LGBT community. But, at the same time, we have had to mourn more black lives and have had to deal with the same race issues we’ve dealt with since the 1950s and well before that.
Race has always been an issue in America. The U.S. was basically founded by making a race feel inferior by nearly destroying their entire community. Though things aren’t as bad as what the country has done before, there are too many people who say, “We have a black president, so racism is over.” If only that were true.
Jessy Forsmo-Shadid
Scrolling down the lovely social media sites, there are a couple things that are apparent to me. First of all, social media can be a great tool to start activism and get people to understand the pain a group of people is going through. Second, social media is also a great place to spread the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Let me be clear. There is an ache in my belly and a need to punch the nearest thing when Caucasian people think they have defined racism. I understand the need to be right, but most of the time it is coming out of a place of privilege.
It’s not enough that innocent black people are getting murdered, but for someone to argue, “That happens to white people, too,” diminishes the pain and fear African-Americans endure in this country.
As a country, our media is much more interested in the killers than the victims, who often times are African-American. We sit in the front row while they show pictures of the murderers and we often forget the names of those who died because of the stereotypes of their pigment.
This summer’s newsfeed was blasted with the horrible deaths of Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson. These nine people were shot in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The most that we did was plaster the name of the shooter everywhere and talk about his previous pictures.
In this country we tend to talk about the monster more than the victims, the people. We talked about the police officer, but we didn’t get to know who Michael Brown was. We still catch up on Trayvon Martin’s killer. And with the most recent case, the case of Sandra Bland, there are too many people making excuses for this woman’s death. We ignore the fact that she was a blossoming human being.
It is said, in order to not care about a human race is by making them lesser. We care less about the people we don’t get to know. If we don’t hear their names, know who they are and make a connection, we are prone to forget.
We must not forget that racism exists. Remember the names of the victims instead of the suspect or killers. To be honest, I’m not completely sure what we can do as a nation to fix all of the racism issues, but at least addressing its existence will help in the long run.
Jessy Forsmo-Shadid can be reached at [email protected]