Jul 16, 2016

Do All Lives Matter?

Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer
Before attempting to answer the question, lets just agree that, as a society, there is absolutely something wrong with us. In 2016, for the first time, we have built a spacecraft that reached Jupiter’s orbit. That is 1.7 billion miles away. Our moon is only about 239K miles away from Earth if that gives you any helpful visual. The unbound human ingenuity is unfathomable to most of us. Yet, in a shamefully disheartening way, we continue to kills our fellow humans callously; as though, it carries no value. All the while we cheerfully invest our time, our labor of love and ultimately our life for decades on end to search the vast unknown universe in hopes of finding anything of a value.

One morning last week, my coworker, looked at me and said, “Daniel, are you alright?” I replied, yeah why wouldn’t I? He responded, “You look sad…” Right away I turned around to say something, but I couldn’t formulate sentences to explain my thoughts and feelings. What I wanted to say was something along the lines of, yes I am sad, I am angry, I am disturbed, I am discouraged and so many other different feelings in between. Is it is not obvious, that we as a country are reaching a tipping point? Haven’t we reached a collective breaking point?

I feel insecure, like I am walking on a field of landmine forced to be cognizant of what lays on my periphery. I feel fearful like I am walking on a shaky ground that’s shifting beneath my feet, way faster than I am able to cope with. Don’t you feel that? Don’t you feel the same?

Before I uttered these words, I realized of course he doesn’t. He is not Black, he does not know what it is like to be a young black man. I contemplated for a bit, but realizing the time and the environment does not suit the kind of conversation I would like to have with him, I took the easy way out. I responded to him saying, hhmm nah I am doing just fine and walked away. For me, this was a sudden realization that the unsettling feeling inside has managed to manifest itself involuntarily into my body language and my daily interaction as a consequence.     

We all have different perspective on life, take the following for instance…

You are looking down at the street from a third floor window and see a police officer approach a young man. The officer says something to the young man and an altercation ensues...you can see everything, but you can't hear the exchange. Unfortunately things escalate and the young man is shot and falls to the ground. 

Now, without having any more information about this incident, it is not hard to imagine the conclusion the individual watching this from the third floor would reach. That conclusion is greatly influenced by the individual’s previous experience and existing internal biases. A Black person and a White person are most likely to differ in their interpretation of the reason for the escalation in this situation. Blames will be attributed ranging from disobedience to use of excessive force.  

No matter who you are, we all have built-in implicit biases to a varying degree. That degree depends on a lot of factors including our experience, upbringing and exposure to diversity (in a deep and indispensable connection to people who are different from us). For example, in the incident described above, you visualized the altercation between the young man and the police officer right? Was the officer wearing uniform? What did he look like? How about the young man? Where did you get these images? What is the information that led you to create these images? 

We have a huge trust gap in this country between races, especially between Blacks and White police officers that stems from decades of perpetual systemic injustice. As such it will take decades to understand, admit and solve the stigma and animosity. 

Reducing racism and other complex issues require long-term policy and intentional efforts on all sides to address the roots of the problem. White peoples' internal bias and perceptions of Black people and vice versa, need to be dissected and explained in a psychological and sociological way. 

So, do all lives matter? Well, we know for sure, White lives matter. As Jesse Williams put it, "We have been looking at the data and we know, somehow police manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill White people everyday!" Now can we say black people are treated the same way by the police? Or is it time to admit, "Some are more equal than others"? (Quote from Animal Farm, by George Orwell).

For those people who say all lives matter, I invite you to watch the video 23 Ways You Could be Killed While Being Black and then try to learn more in detail how each of them lost their lives. Then ask yourself, does this happen to White people at the same rate by police officers? You should find the answer to be unequivocally no. Hence why people have found the need to state and remind people, dark skin people’s lives matter too.    


Hopeful,

Daniel