When I was about ten years old, my dad was walking me home from a friend's house in our Virginia neighborhood. It was after dark when I saw a large black man walking towards us. Without thinking, I moved closer to my dad and clung tightly to his arm until the man had passed. After a few minutes, my dad knelt down on the sidewalk so we were eye to eye, and said to me, "Sweetheart, if you felt scared of that man because he was bigger than you and it's dark outside, I guess that's okay. But if you felt scared of him because of the color of his skin, that's not okay."
I have thought about that instance many times throughout my life. As a ten year old, I had already been influenced by what the media told me about black men. And my father asked me to question those influences. My parents taught me to stand up against prejudice. I saw it on September 12th, 2001, when they sat me down and told me that the parents of my Muslim friends might be afraid to send their children to school, and that I needed to stand up for my friends if anyone made hurtful comments. I saw it again when my dad hung a map on his office wall that Americans would consider "upside down," and he told me, "This is to remind me that not everyone sees the world the way I do."
This was the rhetoric I was raised with, and it's clear from my social media news feed this week that not everyone I associate with was raised the same way.
As you all know, Michael Brown, a recent high school graduate, spent the summer with his grandmother. He and a friend were walking down the street when they were confronted by police and asked to get off of the sidewalk. Here, the story differs depending on who is telling it, but it is undisputed that Brown was unarmed. Several shots were fired by police and Michael Brown was killed. His friend said, "We wasn't committing any crime, bringing no harm to nobody, but my friend was murdered in cold blood."
When the riots began, I found myself wondering, "Why do we have to have this riot all over again? Isn't this the same riot we had for Rodney King? For Trayvon Martin? Has nothing changed?"
I was upset and saddened by the Ferguson event, including the court decision, but I was even more sad to see the way some people reacted to it. For several days, I noticed that many of my friends were posting articles on social media about white people being killed by police officers, or articles arguing that black on white crime goes unreported by the media.
It hurts me to think that when people post these articles, what they are really saying is, "Stop whining, black people. Racism isn't real."
Racism is real, and for some reason, Utahns don't want to acknowledge that, or at least they would like to think that people of color make a bigger deal of racism than they should. The problem of ignoring racism is worldwide, but I believe that there are unique reasons for the phenomenon in my own community. Why are we trying to silence discussions about race, whether they be about institutionalized racism or individual prejudice? What are Utahns so afraid of?
I realize that people don't want to see their police officers blamed and disrespected. I can understand that. I have the utmost respect for our many honest and brave police officers, and I am not necessarily blaming the police for what happened. I think this incident is part of a bigger issue called Institutionalized Racism.
I tutor for Sociology 1010, so I have watched a lot of Utah freshmen sit through their first Sociology lecture and I have seen how they react when their worldview is challenged. I have learned that Utahns hang on fiercely to their ideas about agency, and that their understanding of agency sometimes plays into their ignorance about race in the U.S.
During the first week of Sociology 1010, students are asked to use their sociological imagination. That means, if your friend is going through a divorce, instead of just thinking about the choices made by individuals that caused their relationship to fail, you would think about the larger social issues that cause divorce and how your friend's divorce reflects current trends in society. My tutoring experiences have shown me that, as a group, Utah Mormons usually don't have much of a sociological imagination.
The last thing these freshmen want is for a professor to tell them, "8 out of the 10 reasons you are sitting in a classroom at Utah State have nothing to do with the choices you've made. The reasons you are here instead of sitting at Harvard or sitting in a jail cell are mostly centered around the social situation you were born into."
This is not a piece about the Mormon church being prejudice or incorrect.I am a Mormon, and I believe in agency. But I disagree with the cultural idea that individual choice determines every aspect of a person's life. Utah students want so badly to believe that everything good that has happened to them is due to choices they have made, and that if something bad happens to someone else, it must be because that person made bad choices.
That's why it's so hard for us as Utahns to accept that institutionalized racism is a reality.
A black man my age has a higher chance of going to jail than attending college. If you explain that to a room of Soc 1010 freshmen who grew up in Utah, they are going to want to explain that fact using their worldview of agency. They want to believe that the reason a black man ends up in jail instead of in college is solely because of the choices he has made.
But if you are going to tell me that the aforementioned statistic has nothing to do with racism, then you are arguing instead that black men are simply more lazy and more criminal than white men.
AND THAT IS FUNDAMENTALLY RACIST.
It hurts to examine our own prejudices. We all have them, myself included. But we have to look at ourselves honestly if we want to make the world a better place.
This phrase has been making its way around social media following the Ferguson Decision:
I have noticed several people taking offense to this image, arguing that ALL lives matter. I agree wholeheartedly. All lives do matter. But in the context of current events, black lives are the ones being treated as if they DON'T matter. It would be pointless to have a profile picture that said, "Black and white lives matter" because, as a whole, white lives have never been treated as otherwise in this country. This image is a direct response to a specific tragedy, and I'm not sure why some white people feel threatened by that. Giving one group their rights does not take away rights from another group. It may take away the advantage of privilege, which is threatening to those who are used to privilege. But I don't think the police force will value white lives any less if they value black lives more. We must use the privilege we have been given to support those who are less privileged.
Using my sociological imagination, I can see that the Ferguson incident is just one example of several large-scale social issues in America: gun violence, police brutality, institutionalized racism, mass incarceration, and the relationship between race and policing. I love my country. There are things I don't love about it, and I am going to speak up about those things.
I often hear white people say that they are tired of hearing about race and racism. Well, I'm sorry. The story of America cannot be accurately told without the story of racism. Racism is woven into every part of our lives, and we need to start acknowledging that, rather than hiding from it by telling people to stop complaining.
Using my sociological imagination, I can also see past blaming police officers themselves, and I can see past blaming people for posting thing on social media that I consider prejudiced. I know that people are in part a product of their institutions: their families, their schools, and their churches, and that people who were raised differently than I was are not necessarily wrong. But I think that when we blame society we need to realize that we ARE society. And as a society, we can be kinder, smarter, and more understanding.
