Listen with care to Black Lives Matter
A “Black Lives Matter” banner is being held up by members of the All Souls Unitarian Universalist congregation on Jay Street, New London, every Sunday from 10:45 to 11:15 a.m. Now stories about black lives are going viral on the Internet and being extensively covered by the press and television news shows.
These are not all big-city news stories, but they are getting six-column headlines in the New York Times. Now we often read that police shootings are found unwarranted. We see large campus protests. We read, “A study of thousands of traffic stops finds a wide racial divide in policing.” Another study, reported in The Day, found “Motorists are far less likely to stop for an African-American pedestrian in a crosswalk.”
Black men, women, and children know these “biases exist just outside many people’s conscious awareness.” They experience them every day. Black Lives Matter was started to raise the white conscious and awareness of the fear, the anger, the despair these experiences cause and the caution needed.
I’m just beginning to understand the need for my attention to the Black Lives Matter message.
Astrea S. Hupfel
Waterford