Remember being in elementary school and learning about bullying?  Public schools in our district kept a firm zero-tolerance policy on bullying.  Don’t hit other kids; don’t call names.  How hard could that be?  The role of the bully was never something that most of my peers nor I wanted to take on; however, this wasn’t the hard part.

What required more of an effort from all of us was the important second half of the bullying policy: don’t be a bystander.  With this statement, not only are you expected not to bully, but you are also responsible for intervening if and when you witness bullying.  The word wasn’t in our young vocabularies, but we were being taught not to be Enablers.

We’ve left the playground at this point.  Much less often do we witness kids shoving each other into woodchips or pulling each other’s hair; now, a new kind of violence disturbs our world, though the source of this violence has been shaping our nation since its beginning.

Police brutality aimed at blacks certainly didn’t start this past August at the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, nor did it stop at that. Desipte the world banding together against the violence–from a small town in Missouri, all the way to Pakistan–police continue to shoot and kill.

Open up a newspaper or website and every couple days find a headline along the lines of “Lawsuit Alleges Police Cover-Up In Death Of Sleeping 7-Year-Old” (Huffington Post).

Social media has been keeping this movement on everyone’s radar.  At this point, it’d be hard to find someone who hadn’t heard the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter.”  Unfortunately, this slogan is frequently changed online to “#AllLivesMatter,” because some people can’t understand that while all lives matter, right now all lives aren’t being slaughtered by police.

Many have called for us to “Stop making this about race!”  So stop killing unarmed black people.

And still the case is being made that Darren Wilson, the Ferguson officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, mentioned above, was only protecting himself, and that it is important we don’t forget Brown was a thief as he had robbed a convenience store just minutes prior to his encounter with Wilson.

Not only does it remain unclear whether Brown stole anything from that store (the owner said in court that he isn’t sure that’s Brown on the surveillance footage), Wilson wasn’t even aware that Brown had supposedly stolen anything.

Brown was unarmed and shot in the back, therefore delivering no threat to Wilson’s safety.

If one day it is revealed that that was Brown in that surveillance footage, I will remain strong in my belief that no stolen cigars are worth stealing someone’s life.

I’ve heard more than a few of my white peers talking about how stupid the people of Ferguson are to destroy their own city with these riots they’re doing.  It’s important to pay attention to the wording here, though.

The news calls them “riots,” not “protests,” effectively destroying the meaning behind these assemblies and making them out to be out of control free-for-alls.  (And before busting out the Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes or asking, “What would Martin Luther King do?” remember Martin Luther King peacefully protested, and he was shot and killed too.)

If you find yourself questioning whether or not this whole police brutality issue is “truly” about race, you’ve got privilege.  You’ve got privilege in being unsure of the existence of oppression; you’ve got privilege in not knowing it first-hand; you’ve got privilege in thinking it’s up to you to decide whether one group is truly being oppressed or not.

Sick of all this talk of racism?  Imagine how sick people of color must be of the thing itself.  Of course, we could never imagine it.  But I’m sure more than a few of us young people can recall a visit to a 7-11 or other convenience store wherein we felt as though we were being watched by a suspious, perhaps agist store clerk.  The simple act of existing while being young–something out of our control–led to us being treated unfairly in such cases.  I bet we all could agree that that’s not right.

My final note, and the one I most hope white readers pay attention to, is this: it’s not about us. This whole thing.  It’s not about us.  This issue is about black people and their struggles and their strength.  It’s their thing; they own it.  For once in our lives, we white people need to sit down and be quiet.

Racism didn’t die with the Emancipation Proclamation or with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it certainly never will by denying it.  It’s alive and we cannot pretend it isn’t.  For many, there is no such option.