Dear Editor,
#BlackLivesMatter

Black people, people of color as a whole, are not the enemy. There are many people, black, brown, and white, that have the potential to commit crimes, but the majority of people of color should not be judged by the alleged actions of the minority.

The most recent police violence incident committed by six police officers in Baltimore is a byproduct of a system created by this society that used colonization, the institution of slavery, and capitalism to systematically oppress and dehumanize black people.

That system has been perpetuated to benefit and privilege some people, while oppressing others. What happened in Baltimore, Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Sanford, Oakland, and San Jose – just to name a few locations – is not a few isolated incidents of “incompetence.”

The individuals who should not be punished are the everyday people of color that already have to deal with an oppressive, racist system. They should not be profiled and treated like criminals by the police. Their deaths shouldn’t be celebrated like a New Year’s Eve party.

Most people of color just want to live to see another day and try to have that day turn out better than the last. They want to walk down the street, enter a store, and walk around the campus of their college without feeling like an outsider or somehow, as W.E.B. Dubois so eloquently phrased it, “the problem.” Black people and people of color are not the enemy; white supremacy is.

In San Jose, former De Anza student Phillip Watkins was killed by police officers that “feared for their lives.” According to his family, Phillip seemed like he may have been suffering from a mental health episode. Imagine if the police saw that first, a person in need of help, instead of a threat. When it comes to lethal force, why is it almost always justified when the victim is black or a person of color?

People are not “incidents.” They are human beings and should be treated as such. Black people, and other people of color, don’t need to look at each incident of police brutality in isolation. They don’t live in an isolated society.

They live in a society that has yet to rid itself of the historical and systematic oppression that allows for their dehumanization by the police, the bank teller, the grocery store clerk, the college instructor, their classmates, and the campus newspaper writer.

If we continue to treat all black people, and other people of color, like the enemy, progress will continue to be impossible.

I invite you to read a copy of Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” in order to understand historical systematic oppression and the disproportional impact of police violence on black lives.

Sincerely,
Julie Lewis,
Department Chair of
African American Studies