Why Doesn't the Nation Stand at Attention When Victims Are Brown?

Clutch magazine's Kirsten West Savali says there will never be an appropriate time to point out the racialized differences in our reactions to tragedy, so she might as well do it today. 

Six-year-old Aliyah Shell was standing on the front porch with her mother and younger sister when she was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Chicago.

Seven-year-old Heaven Sutton was standing next to her mother in front of her home selling candy when gunshots rang out on her Chicago block and she crumbled on the pavement, dead from a stray bullet.

Sandra Tyler held her 13-year-old son, Tyquan, in her arms as he bled out on a Chicago sidewalk, another random victim of a senseless, drive-by shooting ...

And the list of black and brown children goes on and on ...

Without fanfare or pomp and circumstance, mothers and fathers in rural towns and urban cities mourn their children quietly, as their memories fade from America’s conscious like tiny footprints in the sand.

There will never be an appropriate time to say that this nation only stands at attention when the majority of victims are white Americans, as was the case at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut, so I might as well say it today.

Read Kirsten West Savali's entire piece at Clutch magazine.

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