You Can't Destroy A Movement

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     I was in theatre almost the entirety of high school. In that program, you can see all kinds of people from all different backgrounds, financial statuses, ethnicities, and religions. No two people were alike. Because of this, a lot of people, along with myself, adopted the idea of being "color blind." I believed it to be the best way to approach seeing people as people instead of their race and, until the past couple years, believed that's what i needed to preach to others. I've since come to realize that that couldn't be further from how we need to view things and the BLM movement as well as Angie Thomas' The Hate You Give provides perfect examples why we can't simply be blind to race.

    Purely based off of her skin tone and neighborhood, Starr automatically feels the need to code switch so she isn't seen as the "angry black girl" or "ghetto." She knows that prejudices and preconceived biases are already placed on her as soon as she walks through the door due to only her skin. Her father sat her down at twelve to tell her how to act around police because "[she] wasn't too young to get arrested or shot" (Thomas 20). To assume that you can be blind to her race is the same as being blind to these prejudices placed on her or the extra caution she feels the need to take around police. It's the same as being blind as to why Khalil was shot three times and why a gun was kept on Starr until the police arrived. Race still plays such a large part in society and trying to act as if it doesn't matter automatically erases the severity of the problem. I understand the concept behind it, but "intentions always look better on paper than in reality" (Thomas 321).

    Angie Thomas does a beautiful job of showing what it is like for black adolescents to fight the constant negative biases thrown at them and further proving why the BLM movement is so important. Racial inequalities may be far from the extreme they once were, but they are far from gone. 

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