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| 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
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