Mike Brown
Your name has rang through the ears of Black Americans, Americans and people across other lands since the day you were murdered. They deemed you the “gentle giant” and somewhere along the lines your humanity and dignity was tossed aside. It wasn’t just a race issue, yet your death heavily involved you being black and you being from the South. Where our ancestrous roots of laboring on our feet day and night make it so hard to lightly tread and avoid the trembling that runs down a Black persons mind when considering having to enter those time-frozen areas. Where majority of the public is Black yet the mayor, city officials, and majority of police force is white. Where the history of your city and it’s racist policies decided where you would live to make others comfortable and avoid contact with you and other “giants,” that weren’t at all scary but just living and trying to survive. Where poverty and classism turns to you and decides that you aren’t worthy. Well Mike you were.

It may be 2014 and we may be entering a new year, yet the familiar racial circumstances that surround us all are very familiar: an old television show no one wanted to see, but keeps rerunning and showing itself to be harder to watch each time. The brutality of Mike’s death was reminiscent of Trayvon Martin’s, and Martin’s reminiscent of Emmett Till’s, and well, Till’s reminiscent of the rotten “Strange Fruit” that Nina Simone described dreadfully.

It’s more than unfortunate that you and others had to be subjected to American structured society: where the dead are raised to be targeted, crucified, and killed again. It’s repetitive and evokes anger and pain over and over again…. Yet the marching can never end, because injustice has proven to be well alive. And so I say thank you to protestors, marchers, social activist for you are all greatly appreciated. The sacrifices of your precious bodies, precious time, and your fragile freedom is not in vain: the world is watching and so is the next generation of young people whom will have to carry on the fight. To the parents whose children’s lives were cut short out of their own power there’s nothing one can really express or say to comfort that never- closing wound, but your strength strengthens us all, and your encouragement to strive for righteousness is most definitely empowering: keep your head up.
A man named Jimi Hendrix once said “when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” To this I say keep striving for love and justice: two things that never come easy, but are always worth fighting for and toward.

Imani Sanders
CSUEB Sophomore/Junior