I have been meaning to make a blog post about the recent events of a 21 year old terrorist who had murdered nine people in an historic African-American church in Charleston, California.
Roof had been welcomed by these people into their prayer, which is not their fault at all, it's just very upsetting. The media had covered the story very typically, without associating the word "terrorist" to him as he is, well, white. The problem with this is that it's very evident that an Arabian shooter is a "terrorist" and strangely, every single Muslim is also labelled as a terrorist. A black shooter is depicted as a "thug," along with every other black person out there, but a white person? Well, they are a "lone wolf" with a troubled past or has some sort of mental illness. This is a prime example of white privilege, they will depict any white murder as a "boy" who walked dogs or liked pizza, but an unarmed black person such as Trayvon Martin, who was 17 at the time he was killed, is a man? Not only that, they armed Roof with a bullet proof vest but do not hesitate to pull out a gun at a black child and aren't afraid to shoot?
For years the media has tried to find excuses for white crimes, even when Roof admitted he wanted to start a race war and for segregation to come back and yet, most people find an excuse for his actions? The American justice system is incredibly flawed and racist because of institutionalised racism. There needs to be a change, starting with us white people accepting the fact that we do in fact have white privilege, although it won't make us purely not-racist, as we highly benefit from institutionalised racism no matter how wrong we think it is, we just have to accept that and try to teach others as well as catching not only other people out but ourselves when we subconsciously think something racist.
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