Rogelio Valenzuela
Period 3
Advanced Composition
26 October 2016
Crayon Box Lives Matter
In recent years one of the biggest issues that has been brought up in the country is alleged police discrimination and brutality against minorities, being the african american race the one most recognized due to historic events. This issue has become so big that if it does not get taken care of, the country will be full of violent scenes like the Los Angeles riots presented. A term all of America’s youth is familiar with nowadays is black lives matter but why not make it every color in a crayon box matter.
The stance some African American individuals take is completely justified and understandable. The exact reason races often discriminate against one another will never be completely discovered. However, in most cases a child will not grow up being discriminating to other races if taught otherwise at home. What this tells us is that racism and discrimination have to do with each family values and outlooks they have been taught about life. There are some families that still live with beliefs of the slavery days because their ancestors always inculcated that trait in the ones around them. This behavior around children will cause a chain in the future because they will believe it is a family value. A child’s parents or guardians are the ones with the heaviest influence on them and their ethics believes when they are young. If the child grows up listening to their father yell out racial slurs at other races and often use discriminating looks and actions on such races, the little kid who wants to be just like his daddy, will carry on these “family values” and inculcate them on his own children.
This issue is so important because it has the potential of leading us to a smaller and different civil war. This will affect the country tremendously because a powerful country cannot be split up into two different sides.The Guardian's The Counted Project, which analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily. It also found 98% of these events didn’t end with an officer being charged with a crime. Lastly, The Guardian also found that if this trend persists, the number of people killed by police will surpass 1,000 by the end of the year. How will the country be able to sustain the name “United States of America” when the country will not be united. Or better yet, since our country already loves labeling things for their appearance, why not name the country “The White, Black, Brown, and Yellow States of America”.
The conflict is all over the news nowadays where there are several news stories about police shooting and killing minorities without a real justification. African American and Mexican American victims are most often the ones victimized in these occurrences. A simple search with the key words “police” and “black male ”or ”hispanic male” should be more than sufficient evidence to such a conflict. Which is disturbingly saddening because finding these stories is ridiculously easy due to the amount of cases that continue to occur today.