Talking BLM

     Yesterday as I was sitting in my Spanish class, I decided to ask a peer of mine what his thoughts were about BLM. In my opinion, race and ethnicity plays an important role in how you choose to support BLM. I for one will admit that before I learned what it was truly about, I too disagreed with the movement. Here is a bit of the conversation that K (this is the name that I am choosing to call him by due to confidential reasons) and I held.

Me: I have a question to ask you, what do you think about Black Lives Matter?

K: I think that it is like the clowns. People just trying to get attention and causing an outrage.

Me: So you don't think that they have any true purpose in what they are trying to achieve?

K: Yes.

Me: So you think that police brutality is just doing their jobs huh?

K: I know some policemen, and they are trained to shoot to kill. If someone is killed, then I guess they had it coming.

Me: So you're telling me that if you have a gun in an open carry state, and are restrained on the ground by two police officers, your family would be okay with them killing you because you weren't "following the law", so they had to shoot to kill?

K: That's different..

Me: How is that different?

K: Because that is police brutality.

Me: That is what happened to Alton Sterling. The saddest part is that most people try and justify his death as "he got what he deserved", whereas Harambe the gorilla, was shot because he was truly a threat to a human life, and people wanted to justify him as innocent and unfair.

After kind of going back and forth, it made sense why my friend was against this movement. He only saw what social media was feeding him, and to pile onto that, most of his peers are too against BLM so this shows that he was only seeing the ugly side of it. Read more than you see people, Black Lives Matter is more than just "raising awareness". It is peaceful and justifiable on why our black community are peacefully attempting to change society into making it equal.