"We have two different wounds and looking at yours does nothing to heal mine." -- "Lost Voices"

In a society filled with discrimination and hardship, two Eastern Michigan University students, Scout Bostley and Darius Simpson, show their audience what it is truly like to be discriminated against. They came together and delivered an incredible performance at the 2015 College Union Poetry Slam, and the video of it has quickly gone viral with over three million views on YouTube.

</center><span id="selection-marker-1" class="redactor-selection-marker"></span> As a white woman and a black man, Bostley and Simpson speak up about the challenges that they each face with racism and sexism. They ask the question, "Can expressing the story of another human being out loud help you internalize it and, in turn, truly understand how he or she feels?"

In their poem, they reveal personal stories that reveal the cruel subjugation brought on by many people throughout their lives.

Bostley starts, speaking for Simpson, "The first day I realized I was black it was 2000. We had just learned about blacks for the first time in second grade. At recess, all the white kids chased me into the woods chanting 'slave'."

Simpson then chimes in speaking from Bostley's point of view, "As a woman, having a boyfriend is a battle. If 70 percent of us are abused in a lifetime, what is the number of men doing it? The answer is not one man running faster than light to complete a mission, and that is what leaves me sick."

By switching mics in the poetry slam piece, Bostley and Simpson show the audience that you can never really speak for someone. When you do, it looks just like their performance with a black man mouthing the words of a white woman and vice versa.

"The problem with speaking up for each other is that everyone is left without a voice," they say together. Watch "Lost Voices" because doing so will leave you anywhere but lost.

This piece may be almost six months old, but when I saw this video, I immediately thought about the Syrian refugee crisis. Many people are discriminating against them for their race and religion. They have stories that are just like the ones that Simpson and Bostley shared. People are trying to speak for them, and it is not helping. This poem proves that we need to quit discriminating against people of any race, sex, religion, etc. and give them the ability to speak up instead of trying to speak for them.