Advanced Essay #4: Blissfully Violent

In 2013, Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church covered the entirety of their lawn in crosses. They were fashioned out of PVC piping and each had a white, red, orange, or beige t-shirt on it. Each shirt had the name of a gun violence victim on it, as well as their age and the day they died. In front of all of these crosses was a sign that read “Philadelphia- highest major-city gun death rate. Where are you, Mayor Nutter?” Each crosses represented one of the 331 people who died because of gun violence in Philadelphia in 2012.

I was thirteen when I drove past this display on my way to my church. I haven’t been able to shake that image from my head. I always knew that Philadelphia is a violent city but I’d been sheltered from just how violent it is. Though I regularly watched the news at night, and I saw the reports about murders in the city, I’d always felt disconnected. I didn’t know anyone from those parts of the city, they didn’t even seem like part of the city I grew up in. I was allowed blissful ignorance because, for the most part, people who looked like me weren’t affected.

I used to go to a private Catholic school outside the city. I was lucky, in that regard. I was never sent to one of Philadelphia’s numerous underperforming neighborhood schools. However, because I was sent to Waldron Mercy Academy,  a private school, I was only ever really exposed to the life of people living in the Main Line. I was never exposed to the harsh reality that so many people in this city live every day. This began to change as I entered SLA, especially during the beginning of my sophomore year, with death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The more evidence of police brutality that came out, the more determined I was to rid myself of my ignorance. As Madeleine Bair from WITNESS has said, “With all the videos that have flooded our news feeds and turned names of victims into hashtags of a social movement, how many videos have we not seen?” How many videos are out there that we haven’t seen because of the almost willful ignorance to this topic. And how many of these incidences have happened with no one there to record what was happening. How many people, how many cops, have gotten off because no one wants to believe a cop is capable of something this terrible.

People, especially people uneffected by it, have a way of trivializing violence. We find ways to make it seem like it isn’t such a big deal, and that it doesn’t affect many people. I was one of those people. I let myself be blinded by the privilege I held, and if I wasn’t going to SLA, I most likely still would be. I can see the posts that my friends from my middle school put up on Facebook, and I don’t know how to react. They trivialize the Black Lives Matter movement and don’t want to acknowledge the systematic oppression that extends into every aspect of our country. And they certainly aren’t the only ones. According to a survey conducted by PBS NewsHour and Marist College, “59 percent of whites described the [Black Lives Matter] movement as a distraction from the real issues, whereas only 26 percent of African Americans felt this way.”

At this point, we’ve accepted gun violence as a part of life. We certainly don’t want it to be something we regularly hear about on the news, but the way we see it, there is nothing we can do. While this idea is beginning to change, especially in the African American community, one of the communities most affected by violence, this change is facing an uphill battle. Ignorance is indeed bliss, and that comfort is not something many people want to leave behind. We, as people with privilege, do not want to acknowledge this privilege, because than it means that we acknowledge that change needs to happen, and that is something we don’t want to do. The system as it is works incredibly well for us, but only because the system is rigged that way. We have an advantage solely because others do not.

And we, people with privilege, go out of our way to excuse that privilege. We try to talk our way out of the privilege we hold. And we do the same with regards to gun violence. As essayist Susan Sontag has said, “Words alter, words add, words subtract.” Words can be used to change a horrible situation that needs attention to an issue for other people to deal with. One of the only ways to combat this is to use photographic evidence. We might try to trivialize photos and videos, but seeing a horrible truth is different than hearing about it. In the same essay as above, Sontag also said, “The horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken.” Although Sontag was talking about the images from Abu Ghraib in Iraq, her argument could easily be about police brutality and gun violence. Both situations were and are perpetrated by people we are supposed to trust. People who are supposed to protect us. And both situations are and were enacted on people they felt superior to. This is the definition of privilege.

Works Cited

"'Black Lives Matter' Confounds White People | DiversityInc." DiversityInc. 25 Sept. 2015. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

<http://www.diversityinc.com/news/black-lives-matter-confounds-white-people/>

"Caught on Camera: Police Abuse in the U.S." WITNESS Media Lab. 08 Sept. 2015. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

<https://lab.witness.org/caught-on-camera-police-abuse-in-the-u-s/>

Sontag, Susan. "Regarding The Torture Of Others." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 May 2004. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.