February 26th, 2012: A young man walks home from a convenience store. He encounters another man; there is an altercation and the younger man is shot and killed. His name is Treyvon Martin, and his death at the hands of George Zimmerman sparked outrage nationwide. Not necessarily because of the suspicious circumstances surrounding Martin's death, but due to a much more boorish and uncivilized motivation: Martin was black, and Zimmerman was white-Hispanic. Now, with Zimmerman's recent attempts to sell the gun used in this tragic shooting, the news media has once again been flooded with ideas of racism and injustice.
I mean, it's no secret; that terrible beast called racism is still alive and well in the world today. As we've seen over the past number of years, many people want to share their thoughts and opinions on the subject (as a side note, I find no small coincidence that this topic began appearing more and more frequently upon the election of our nation's first minority president). Racism, unjust prejudice, and all that jazz. And with events like the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, the entire nation has been captivated by the issue. Between all of the riots--for I refuse to dignify many of those gatherings as "protests"--and talks about "raising awareness" of racism, we've certainly been beaten black and blue with it. And I'm honestly not sure why.
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Now, please don't misunderstand me. Raising awareness about racist actions is a good idea; sheltered as a child myself, I did not realize that such a state of racial tension still existed until I was much older. But here's the catch: raising awareness is absolutely not going to help make this problem go away. Don't follow? How about this:
According to a CNN report, about 47,055 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2014. So if I go and give a series of lectures, raising awareness about the danger of drugs, will I solve the problem? Not by a long shot. To simply say that there is a problem is not enough. Solutions must be presented in tandem, or another forty-seven thousand people will probably die next year. New methods for preventing illegal drug manufacturing and sales, better methods for preventing people from getting onto drugs to begin with, or harsher consequences for drug related criminality.
The same concept needs to be applied to the topic of racism. Talk all you want about problems, but unless someone starts talking about solutions, I predict that this problem will get much worse before it gets much better.
