25/07/2024
ITsStillNotNormal…
Last week, I had to speak with a student who just buried a friend. My young king is only 14 years old and he was present when his teenage friend was murdered. The day after the funeral he returned to school for freshmen academy ready to engage, but he couldn’t focus. Instead of us talking about the novel he just read, or how he has improved in math, we are talking about how he has to cope with the senseless murder of his friend, and how he was there when it happened !!! We are not talking about his experience at Outward bound, we are talking about how a teenager had to clean a friend’s body to prepare him for burial!!!
If only Black men and women can gather on a phone call and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in one night, maybe we can change this narrative.
Since my original post we have a new President, a new Governor and a new Mayor and I am still having the same conversations. We are still holding press conferences about mass shootings. We are still seeing unarmed Black people being murdered by police.
We need systemic and systematic change, not just a change in leadership.