It’s been halfway through our program here in Accra, yet I’ve been unsure on what to write about for the blog. I have a selfish desire to need to write something profound/clever and this post is not much different.
While we were in Kumasi this morning, I woke up to a Facebook message from my boyfriend: “Not guilty.”
At this point, you would have to be living under a rock to not hear the story of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old who was stalked and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch vigilante who thought that this unarmed teenager was a thug in a hoodie. Though no one but these two know the exact details of this encounter, it is clear that the murder of Trayvon was racially motivated and that the American court system has shown very clearly that hate crimes will not be brought to justice.
During work this week, I have conversed with a few co-workers about race in America and events like this case. I kept thinking about the adorable pictures of my co-worker Suad’s son, Ato, who just turned two this week. How could I tell her I miss a country that would never seek justice for a murdered boy that shared the same skin as him? How can I possibly be proud of a nation that has said “Never Again” to the horrific systems of slavery a hundred years ago, to colonialism, to Jim Crow laws, to the cold-blooded murder of black children when it feels like these atrocities have never left? How are we a “post-racial society” when the Supreme Court just cut out an essential part of the Voting Rights Act, because it “was based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day”? For the thousandth time, I am ashamed to be an American.
As I am mulling over these ideas amidst surges of anger, I of course, say to myself, hey, this would make a great blog post. I’ll be poignant! Heart-wrenching! Maybe even controversial! I’ll talk about how I see faces like Trayvon’s everywhere in Accra (because black male faces are interchangeable, right?), how we must all stand together to fight injustice or some other cheesy diatribe.
But I stop and check myself. Am I outraged at the verdict because I am in Ghana, because I am surrounded by black faces? Am I only feeling this way because I’m in a foreign country? Would I write something like the paragraph above if I were in America, in Oregon where many of the faces I see are white? It’s not as if I’ve only realized how screwed up the justice system is because I’m in Ghana.
The question remains. Though I feel that I would still be heartbroken and angry at the outcome, it would be ignorant of me to say that I would only be really ashamed of the death of someone who looked like Ato, when I should be ashamed of the murder of any black child in the U.S. Just because I am in Ghana, suddenly my empathy has grown tenfold, which partially stems from my Western bias and pity for third-world countries. This I know, and it’s stupid as hell. This is a mindset that I have actively tried to dismantle; yet here I am, no different than Rudyard Kipling. I am annoyed at myself that I don’t think of my black American peers, that I just whine over my pride as an American.
This is not a post about how we should react to violence and injustice. It’s just a process of my thinking and evolution as a young adult striving for a progressive future.