351 Deaths: Reviving Talks On Race

About two weeks ago, every student received a paper in his or her PO box that listed the names of every African American who has been killed by the police in 2015, a list that for most of us was astonishingly long.

It has been more than eight months since the murder of Michael Brown, which for many marked the start of the loud national uproar and outcry for change. This, however, was not the beginning of racial bias in the use of police force, and as we have seen from the continuing deaths of African Americans in the hands of officers across the country like Eric Garner (died July 17, 2014; age 43), Tamir Rice (died Nov. 22, 2014; age 12) and hundreds of lesser known but equally important names, this is not the end. 

We are not even four months into 2015 and the amount of African Americans killed by the police is already recorded to be 351 by a website called “Killed by the Police.”

Additionally, these papers had the bolded headline “Total-Unknown” that reminded us the scary truth: many of these incidents go completely unreported much less unreported to the general public. 351 people have died at the hands of police in the past four months and far fewer than one percent are household names. Their stories go unreported and unshared. 

In a more recent case a 50-year-old African American man named Walter Scott was shot and killed by an office in North Charleston, South Carolina. The officer responsible, Michael Slager, reported that he felt his life being threatened by Scott who had supposedly stolen his taser. The shooting however, was caught on camera by a bystander who captured a video of Scott running from Slager and being shot in the back five to eight times. Officer Michael Slager is now being tried on a charge of first degree murder and faces up to thirty years of jail time and possibly the death penalty. 

Walter Scott was a father to four children and was engaged to be married when the shooting took place. He served two years in the United States Coast Guard, he operated a forklift and was studying massage therapy. Walter Scott was shot and killed on Apr. 4, 2015, and it was all caught on tape. But what if it hadn’t been? What would have happened if the eyewitness video has never been captured? The police would have stuck to the story of Scott stealing Officer Slager’s taser and threatening his life with it. There would be no indictment, no charges against Slager at all. Walter Scott would have been demonized by the media and the defense council. We would all be left with another murder in cold blood being justified to us as necessary and the rest of the African American community would be left without justice.

The papers that we found in our PO boxes, and were by most of us promptly discarded, ultimately made the majority of the student body wildly uncomfortable, something that seemed like an unfortunate backlash and unforeseen result of the PO distribution. Though the distributor still remains anonymous, this seems to have been an underlying mission of the project. The disagreeable feeling that came from these lists spark opinion, whether it be conscious or not, in an area of relevant events where there should not be apathy, which in turn provokes conversation among Exonians.

This conversation is important to me and to many other students on campus. It is something that seems to be ignored often but shouldn’t be. During fall term, a die-in was held in honor of Michael Brown and the non-indictment of Officer Wilson, I heard of some students and faculty talking about the issues and their opinions. This is hardly a start, and these lists among other things revive conversations about race. 

This all additionally ignores a fact, however, that most of our student body fails to recognize, that seems to fail to penetrate the “Exeter Bubble.” Yes, these numbers are astonishing, they are horrific, they might make you ridiculously uncomfortable, but especially for Caucasian students like myself, which makes up more than half of Exeter’s population, we forget that it is a privilege to only feel uncomfortable by these papers and their content and not fear for your own safety.