Grade 7
Informational, Narrative, PersuasiveWritingAfrican-Americans die every day, and not of natural causes. We know about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Renisha McBride, and many more. Those were hate crimes. What I’m talking about is something incomprehensible – little black boys and black men killing each other. The black community had an uproar about those murders, but did they realize that the biggest problem is that black boys and men are killing each other? Don’t get me wrong, hate crimes are horrid, but killing each other in retaliation is just as bad.
Thirty-nine percent of men in gangs are black. Some believe I don’t need an education, that I can just join a gang. But why would I wanna make bankrolls with the chance of getting shot in the head? Why murder someone to make money with the chance of people wanting to avenge that death? We ask all these questions but do absolutely nothing. We are scared and hide behind message boards on Facebook to talk about the problem. Facebook is not – and will never be – the real world.
We get labeled as ghetto, hood, and poor by other people. But we don’t just accept it, we live it. Too many wear it as a badge of honor or a joke. Middle-income children go to school joking about poverty, never having faced it or having to fight for their lives. They joke that the hood is cool, when in reality it’s not. But instead of doing something they make a meme out of it and post it on social media. Of all the memes I have seen, nobody has actually said anything important.
I feel that black and brown lives actually do matter when we are protesting cops killing little black boys and men… but not when we kill each other. We undermine killing each other when we instead focus on cops. Both are important and need to be dealt with. We need to stop killing each other and unite. We have to change ourselves and come together. We need to start with the man in the mirror. We must change our ways before we try to change others.
But I don’t think this is limited to African-Americans. This is a world epidemic happening in many more communities, in cities sadly full of violence, in Detroit, Chicago, New York, and more places. People need to stop turning their heads when violence happens. America as a whole focuses on the wrong things, absorbed in the lives of celebrities and sports, but when it comes to big issues, we focus on the miniscule things.
Tyshawn Lee was murdered, but what made the most headlines was what his mother did with the settlement money. I’m not at all saying that I think what she did was okay, but the point is, when important things happen we focus on the things of little-to-no importance.
My generation may be the world’s only chance, but our flaw is political correctness to the effect that you can’t say anything and are too scared to stand up and make change. So heads up everybody: the world, but mostly the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” is on a roller coaster, and it’s going downhill.
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