ONCE AGAIN: We are not having a full discussion about gun violence if we fail to acknowledge that police brutality targets black people. When the police become a part of school campuses, the arrests on Black students only increases, as do physical assaults.
If you need a refresher, please recall how “School Resource Officer” Ben Fields body slammed a teenage black girl for the “crime” of being on her cell phone.
Arming school teachers is an incredibly bad idea. And placing Black students in proximity to police officers needlessly puts innocent Black children at risk. We need a better, more nuanced solution. “More police” fails as a solution for nearly the same reasons that “more guns” does.
I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: Maybe if Mr. Cruz’s classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Davis would never have occurred.
This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates. The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
Hello. You may remember this post I made about the brutal agression of French students, organized by the University’s Dean. I have some updates, if you’re interested. Since Thursday, we haven’t been idle. We went of several marches and protests against the violences, asking for the Dean to step down. As of today, he has been arrested, alongside the History teacher who came with the fascist group and hit the students.
Friday morning, there was still blood on the stairs leading to the Law University. At 1pm, 400 students gathered in front of the uni, where the girl in the picture in my previous post came to explain what happened, before passing out and being transported back to the hospital. Then, we marched to the Prefecture, where we asked to be received by the Prefet. We were, and he listened.
Sunday, there was a fascist march, which we stopped by simply being three times as many and making them run. The police was protecting them from us, even if they were the one who attacked and we haven’t hurt anyone in the two months our strike has been going on.
Tuesday, we held an Assembly at my university, to vote for the continued blocking of the campus, as well as our Dean’s resignation. The picture at the top of this post is when we voted (we were around 3,000 people). As you can see, we won. We vote for the unlimited blocking of the campus until all our demands are met (demands which include the French President’s resignation, only because we know we’ll never get it which means the blocking will never stop).
On Tuesday, the students who were hurt at the Law University went to the Police Station. The police officers refused to receive them, claiming their complain wasn’t acceptable and they were never attacked by fascist. So we sent about 200 students from our Assembly to the Police Station and we basically yelled them into submission. Our friends were received and their complaint heard.
Today, we marched against police violence and fascists groups. We marched fro three hours, we blocked the train station (because the train company employees are striking and we are supporting them). The police treated us like dangerous criminal, and we had to hide our faces because the fascists are taking pictures of us and compiling them to attack us in the street. We were 1,200.
Please share this around, like you did for the first post. Something big is happening. Our friends who were sent to the hospital deserve it.
wupacing 