Welp, another black was gunned down by law reinforcement...
#BLACKLIVESMATTER
The police force is being trained incorrectly...
Being black is considered a crime...
Black until proven innocent...
All of these phrases above are a few of the many I noticed while on Facebook a few days ago. All of them were posted by people of color except for one comment made by a white male who is dating a black woman. On Tuesday, July 5, 37-year-old Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside of a convenient store around midnight in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. According to CNN.com, a homeless man had asked Sterling for money and was being persistent, and Sterling threatened him, saying he had a firearm. Immediately, the homeless made a call to the police, claiming that Sterling had a gun on him and that he was "brandishing it."
A now viral cellphone video was taken of the altercation once the policemen came. In the video, two white, male policemen nailed Sterling to the ground and after a minute or so of struggle, they shot him multiple times in the chest and the back. Rather than approach this man with caution or simply pin him to a car and handcuff him, these two men aggressively pushed Sterling to the ground and shot him. Yes, Sterling did have a gun in his pocket, but he wasn't using it. He didn't attack anyone with it. Sterling was easy going, and was known as "The CD Guy" because he could be found at that spot every night at the convenient store. Just five minutes before his death, the convenient store worker, Muflahi, said that he bought a drink and joked around with him. He didn't hurt anyone, and wasn't planning on hurting anyone.
Yes, it is true that Alton Sterling had a criminal record and had gone to jail for possession of a firearm and marijuana, but he was a free man. He was immediately perceived as a threat by these two police officers because of the color of his skin. This is, yet again, a racist murder! How many more times is a white policeman going to shoot an African-American before all American racists, people in denial about America being infallible in its ways, and ignorant people understand that this is murder? I simply don't understand this.
Obviously, when I heard about Alton Sterling's shooting, I was horrified, especially because it was recorded on a phone and was put online for people to see. A few thoughts went through my mind: "Oh, this is devastating. Another black man was shot..." and "I can't believe this graphic murder was recorded and put online..."
Cops lie to protect themselves. We've seen this, and we know this. Cameras have recently been placed on their gear, and I believe this was created due to the amount of police brutality that has suddenly sparked up over the past five years. It's a shame that our world has used technology as a platform to prove certain things, but it is good when it comes to proving what is wrong and what is right.
We clearly know this is racist murder. In Sterling's case, he was shot almost immediately; however, in this video of a white male fighting a police officer for several minutes, he lived to tell the tale after this video was posted online. Sure, this is a different situation because these police officers are from a different state, and who knows? This video could be fake! Nevertheless, this man is white. He is a white male, and the while male police officers showed restraint. Unbelievable.
Saving a life is a choice. It is a choice that a person with a gun makes. The policemen of our country worked hard in their academies and were chosen to live to protect our people. All of our people. Black people are being killed what seems like every day in America. We are a racist country, there's no doubt about it. It's truly terrifying to be a young person and to grow up in our evolving America and have to be paranoid about my brother, my friend, my cousin, uncle or any other black man I know.
Now the question is, and this is the hardest question to answer: How can we help? How can we end the violence and racism? Well, racism clearly can't be fixed in one day. I've talked about this problem with my friends a bit, and we've gotten into passionate conversations about gun control and the replacement of bullets with rubber bullets. One of my friends even suggested that we have policemen use Nerf guns instead of bullet guns! As absurd as those suggestions sound, they could cause a serious decrease in the amount of fatal violence.
We need to keep putting our minds together in order to create change, and we have to remember that if one black man is murdered, there will be hundreds of voices speaking his name the next day, praying for his family, and there will be thousands of allies on his side. We can beat racism, but the hashtag #blacklivesmatter does not seem to be true, because with all the recent shootings between black men and the law enforcement, #blacklivesclearlydon'tmatter.
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