These kids decided addressing racism was their business
In the story of the Texas pool party, where a police officer was caught on tape manhandling and pointing a gun at young black teenagers, there's a lot to be concerned and outraged about. But there's also one tiny thing to celebrate: the actions of two white kids.
Just 14 and 15 years old, they wasted no time speaking on the record about the racist comments made by adults that they said set off the incident, and recording the discriminatory treatment they said they witnessed.
Sadly, when it comes to public opinion about the event, it's likely that these accounts have more weight coming from the white kids than from the black kids who have offered similar stories, but whom many media consumers might see as potential criminals and untrustworthy reporters of what happened.
Stone's choice to speak about the racist comments she witnessed, and Brooks's decision to post his recording and analysis on YouTube and give an interview about what he observed, represents an unusual commitment to honesty about racism and discrimination — topics many white adults don't see through the same lens.
For example, a November 2014 Pew poll revealed that nearly half of white Americans thought race got too much attention in the discussion surrounding 18-year-old Michael Brown's death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. When asked about confidence in police to not use excessive force on suspects, 36 percent of white respondents expressed a great deal of confidence, compared with 18 percent of black respondents.
And in October 2014, the Washington Post reported on an analysis of years of polling by Harvard University professor Michael I. Norton, who found that 56 percent of black people but only 16 percent of white people said they believed there was "a lot" of discrimination in America. White people were more likely than not to say they thought anti-white discrimination had become a bigger problem than bias against blacks.
"White silence = white consent."
When you consider the well-documented social, economic, and political injustices against black people that have been committed both with and without the backing of the legal system, this looks like willful ignorance, and it can be infuriating.
That's why when Walter Scott, a 50-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back and killed by Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager, Tim Wise (a white author who focuses on anti-racism) wrote this on his public Facebook page in response to those who insisted race had nothing to do with the tragedy:
I know there are some well-meaning (as well as not well meaning) white folks who say how awful the killing of Walter Scott was "regardless of the racial element," but please... When we as white folks strip away the social context within which these things happen, or refuse to acknowledge the generations-long soul wound imposed by racism upon peoples of color, we speak as if history didn't happen, as if historical memory doesn't matter, as if every day is disconnected from the last, and patterns are irrelevant. We speak, in other words, as persons with the privilege of ignoring the backbeat of white supremacy, as persons who enjoy the luxury of viewing life as a collection of random experiences, and ourselves are mere individuals floating through that life. How nice. People of color have not the luxury of such a conceit ...
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