By Taliyah Lowe
Clifford Glover. Claude Reese. Randy Evans. Yvonne Smallwood. Amadou Diallo. Sean Bell. Oscar Grant. Trayvon Martin. Jordan Davis. Jonathan Ferrell. Aiyana Jones. Eric Garner. John Crawford. Mike Brown. Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Charleston 9. Sandra Bland. Corey Jones. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Terrence Crutcher. Keith Scott. Jordan Edwards. Stephon Clark. Bothem Sean. Atatiana Jefferson. Amaud Arbery. George Floyd.
Their lives mattered. These people deserved to live. The question is how do you live in a society that doesn’t see you for who you are, but instead sees you by the color of your skin? We have tried to push the fact that racism doesn’t exist, but tell that to all those families that had lost their loved ones. Why is the world harder for black people than white? Just because black people have a darker complexion. Why does the color of a black person’s skin make them a target? Racism is here, it was shown in all the innocent lives that were snatched away. Black parents are forced to have difficult conversations with their children on how to deal with the police and make it back home safely because not everyone does. Being black in a country that was designed for you makes every opportunity twice as hard to get, it makes becoming educated your “golden ticket” when everyone should be educated, most importantly it makes surviving twice has hard. The black community is tired of surviving, they want to live. They don’t want to worry anymore that their cellphone, or hairbrush would be mistaken for a gun. This year 2020 gives me hope. To see people of every background and ethnicity out there and protesting it shows that change is possible. Barack Obama once said “ Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” That change is now and this is just the beginning of the end of something that was never fully ever gone: racism. For try first time, in a long time, everyone is on the same team.
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