My heart feels heavy writing about a hate crime again! It was just a few months ago, (May 26th 2020) that George Floyd, a 46 year old Black American was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill.
On August 23rd 2020 another news clip went viral. Jacob Blake was shot! The video shows he obliged to the police and was shot seven times for no fault of his at the scene! There are several reports about him being a child rapist and so on. None proved.
Racism is a social evil prevalent in our society for centuries.
In 1963, Martin Luther King gave the famous speech “I have a dream”. Our children learn about him in school. We have an MLK day. For what? That dream still remains a dream!
Being punished for being born in a certain race which we u have no control over! Even worse, you have the right to kill me for it? How progressed are we? We boast of racism and feminism being an old generation thing! But is that true?
What we need today is a radical overhaul of the existing regulatory framework. We need to see people for what they do(by this, I don’t mean the work they do) , the values or thoughts they carry forward. Not for the gender or race they belong to!
I was born and raised in India where I used to be irritated when I saw older people in my family not talking to the so-called “lower caste”. The maid and other workers doing odd jobs had a separate entrance. They ate in the kitchen sitting on floors.
The only good thing is, I grew up watching this and decided I would never do the same thing!
But children across the globe have seen even worse. They have seen blacks being killed as a norm! Police brutality and racially motivated violence against Black people is an everyday news now.
The Police is doing its job of protecting people; there are no two ways about it. But who gives you the right to kill? Who gives you the right to shoot someone right in front of his /her children?
I was once told that, I’m not God and I can’t decide when I will or will not die. So who makes YOU one? How do you decide a Black has to die for being Black?
I know, a blog from me or a few tweets from celebrities is not going to change anything. But we can do our part in raising awareness. We can teach our children what racism is and how it’s wrong. We can raise youth with compassion and moral values for a better tomorrow.
I’m brown, but does that matter? What I write and teach my child does.
These racially motivated violence across the world is the real villain of our times. Our world doesn’t deserve Mahatma Gandhi’s experiments with truth or Martin Luther King’s dream or Thurgood Marshall’s courage and victory.
We left slavery behind, but how far behind? Living every moment with the fear for one’s life, how different is it from slavery?
How many more Floyd’s and Blake’s will it take for the world to understand that they do not own other people’s lives? The names don’t matter anymore! But their lives do!
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