Today was a beautiful, peaceful day. After marching and chanting on the campus, I walked down to Penn Station with fellow Hopkins students to meet up with students from local colleges and other high schools to protest against racist police brutality and fight for justice for Freddie Gray. I am impressed by and grateful for the organizers from each college, especially the Hopkins organizers and the other three main organizers, Korey Johnson and John Dennis Gillespie from Towson University and Jordan Johnson from Goucher College.
I was pleased to see a Hopkins presence at the protest in solidarity with Baltimore. I encourage others to support the community and our black peers. However, even as we engage in protest and elevate the voices speaking out against racism and police brutality, we must constantly question and challenge ourselves.
Why are so many Hopkins students protesting now? Many have protested in the past, but this weekend was the largest visual effort of socially conscious students. Why did I protest this weekend and not the weekend before? Police brutality and the blatant oppression of the black community have been ongoing for centuries. I believe that so many students, including myself, have only made a concentrated effort to protest after the media depicted incidents of property damage. Even though we were protesting for Freddie Gray, hence the signs that read “I mourn broken necks not broken windows”, it still took riots and property damage to get people out in the street. Oppression is not temporary and therefore our response to oppression should not be temporary.
Similarly, we must continue to believe in and fight for the ideal that Black Lives Matter. While this ideal manifests itself in physical protest, it should also do so in our everyday lives. It is not enough to tweet a trending hashtag or join a protest with our friends once in a while; we must support movements for equality every minute of every day. Racist jokes perpetuate a system of white supremacy. Call your friends out. When your friends of color talk about their experiences of racism, do not belittle or deny their experiences. I acknowledge my imperfections and I ask my friends to call me out if I say something out of line; I promise to call my friends out. Support women. Support the LGBTQ. Support people of color. Support the marginalized, support the oppressed, support the forgotten.
One chant during the protest struck me a little harder than the others: “Apathy is violence.” I believe that apathy is a conscious choice, and if you choose to be apathetic, you choose to support the status quo. Apathy is a demonstration that you do not care about the lives of your fellow citizens, your classmates, and your friends. The rage felt by protestors is out of love for humanity; the apathy felt by some of our fellow classmates is subtle racism. I encourage myself and others to choose empathy, to eschew apathy and hatred, and to challenge and criticize themselves and their peers.
In rejecting apathy we choose love.
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