I started my life living on a busy street that was residential on one side and commercial on the other. The gas station across the street was often robbed, and the high school was not a safe place to be. I lived in a mid-sized city in the Midwest, and like most cities in the 1960’s and 70’s, there was racial tension and civil unrest about the Vietnam War. My dad watched the news, so I saw both peaceful marches and police using clubs and tear gas to control crowds. I saw crowds breaking into stores and looting. I don’t remember seeing it, but JFK, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King were all assassinated during my early childhood. The war ended, some laws changed, and my parents moved us to a small town before my brother and I reached high-school age. I appreciated my parents for moving us out of there, and after a while, it seemed as if those problems didn’t exist anymore. It took a while for me to realize that just because we moved away from the violence and injustice, it didn’t mean that the violence and injustice had stopped.
Fifty years later, I am saddened and outraged that people’s mentality has not changed. People of color are still being looked upon as less than the rest of humanity. I don’t think all police officers are prejudiced, and I don’t think all people of color are criminals. I had hoped that by now, everyone would think that way. Has our society learned nothing?
I have worked with children from a lot of places who look different from one another, but I am most afraid FOR (not of) those who have dark skin. I helped in a pre-school class for a short time, and the teacher talked to the class about being good citizens. She asked them what happens if we break the law, expecting them to say that we would get in trouble. A four-year-old African American boy said, “You get shot.” None of the other children had that as their first thought, but he did.
I worked with two extremely tall, extremely dark-skinned middle-school boys who had moved to the U.S. from overseas and were trying to learn the English language. They transferred to other schools, but I still pray for them. I am scared that there will come a time and place where they are misunderstood and accused of something they did not and would not do. They came to the United States for a better life, and I hope that their lives are better here than the lives they would have lived in their country of origin. I wonder what they think when they see the news. Does it scare them?
I mourn with the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of anyone who dies from anything, but when someone is killed needlessly by police or by criminals, it especially saddens and angers me. Violence breeds violence. We need peace to prevail. Everyone’s life is a gift from God to the World. We are all humans born to love one another. Racism needs to stop.