Lauren Doherty, Editor-in-Chief
@LDohertyCourant
Nearly one year ago today I grabbed my mask, phone, and camera and headed down to Saxe Middle School to meet up with the Courant staff. We had talked on Zoom the night before about the task at hand: to report on the Black Lives Matter protest. It was a sensitive subject, not only the topic itself but also the fact that we, a wealthy and largely homogenous community, were hosting a Black Lives Matter protest. I’d done some reading in advance, absorbed information from news sources like the New York Times, NPR, and NBC News, to try and get a grasp at the story.
But still, as a sixteen year old white girl who lived inside the bubble of New Canaan, I was unable, and will forever be unable, to fully understand the emotions of the community behind Black Lives Matter. I have never experienced racism, I have never experienced police violence, I have never felt unsafe due to the color of my skin. Those, while all testaments to my own privilege, barricade me from ever being able to fully understand. So one year ago, I made myself a promise: to learn the best I could.
Above all, the best way to face this task was through education. I’ve always considered myself relatively smart. I receive good grades, I like to read books, I’ve never failed a class. But, when I dug back into what I truly knew about the racism and treatment of POC in our country, I found that most of my knowledge was limited to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. While certainly key members of the American Civil Rights Movement, it proved to me that I knew nearly nothing about this topic.
I could tell you that Harriet Tubman ran the underground railroad, but not the significance of her actions. I could tell you Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech to thousands, but I couldn’t tell you how communities responded to those words. As a journalist I like to think I always have the mindfulness to step back and embrace the full picture, so that was my next task.
Inside the walls of NCHS alone, I’ve read “The Narrative of Frederick Douglass” and deeply researched the Civil Rights movement in my AP US history class. I’ve investigated court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and Dred Scott v. Sanford. I’ve read about key figures like W.E.B. DuBois, Sojourner Truth, and Malcolm X. I’ve studied historical situations like the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine, and the Freedom Riders.
One of the best movies I watched, “The Hate You Give” (also a book), showed through a heartbreaking lens the police violence towards the Black community. The main character, Starr Carter, a sixteen year-old Black high school student, witnesses the murder of her friend Khalil by a police officer. She spends her life divided between her Black neighborhood, Garden Heights, and her primarily white school, Williamson Prep. Over the course of the movie, she grows more outspoken, determined, and educated to fight against racism. Reading and watching stories expressed by Black authors about these kinds of situations helped me grasp the image of the fight against racism. Characters such as Starr were people who I imagined could be my friends, it made the whole subject brutally real to me.
And it would be foolish to ignore the events of today that will shape the history lessons of our future. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and countless more prove that the treatment of POC is still unacceptable. It proves that the world we live in today is still racist, even half a century after the Civil Rights Act.
When I attended the Black Lives Matter march one year ago, one of the signs that most stood out to me read, “I understand that I will never understand, but I stand”. So today, I’m seventeen, I’m still a white girl; my voice does not yet carry the weight to amplify through the country. I acknowledge that I will never be able to relate, so instead I provide myself as an ally. I won’t sit back and regurgitate that our country is one where everyone is treated with freedom and equality, the past year has opened my eyes to the fact that it is not. There’s so much more for me to learn, more that I can do to help progress this movement. And so, I stand.
