As an active member of our very strained society, I will say that, going forward, there should be nothing more important than speaking out against the way some of our RCMP officers currently treat and handle serious situations involving Black and Indigenous people. Whether it’s the shooting death of Chantel Moore or an RCMP officer hitting an Inuk man with his car door, one thing is very clear: practicing racism in any way, shape, or form should not be the way our society should ever behave.
It’s infuriating how these last few weeks—to say nothing of Black and Indigenous history in general—have just been a ongoing trend of violent incident after violent incident brought on by police harassment against Black and Indigenous people.
It needs to stop.
Systemic racism needs to stop. It’s not somehow morally appropriate to openly harass fellow citizens just because of the colour of their skin. These beliefs are grossly untrue and vastly dangerous.
To the RCMP officers and anyone who makes the choice to condone racism: when will you learn? How many Black and Indigenous people have to die before we learn that systemic racism is wrong? The same people who we expect to keep us all safe every day are often the ones who harass Black and Indigenous people instead of going after criminals.
To tell you the truth, as a student reporter, it angers me to have to sit here and write about why systemic racism is bad on all fronts and needs to stop. I’m so angry about this because it’s nothing new. In fact, whether it’s Malcolm X’s famous “the ballot or the bullet” speech or Martin Luther King Jr.’s victorious “I have a dream” speech, these internationally recognized works—among many, many others—spread the exact same message over and over again.
COVID-19 is a threat, but I wonder whether systemic racism is the real pandemic here in 2020. It needs to stop.