“I Shouldn’t Have to Write This” by
Justin Smalls is a spectacular article on police brutality in black communities. I love how he repeats the line “I shouldn’t have to write this” to show the frustration he and many black people feel when they see yet another hashtag about a black person wrongfully killed by police. On the same Race Relations page, Maryah Watkins’ article, “Exposing the Empathy Bias,” mentions a study that found that “White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black.”
Another point I love about Justin’s article is that he mentions footage he saw of a white man fighting off two officers; they didn’t shoot him and even waited to tase him. It reminds me of when officers took the white gunman Dylann Roof to Burger King because he said he was hungry after killing nine people in an African American church in North Carolina. If any of these incidents happened with a black person as the perpetrator, he would have been shot. We must not forget how quickly police assumed that the toy gun Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, was holding was real.
America needs to wake up and see that racial bias in law enforcement is real and needs to end. I shouldn’t have to write this.