Unfortunately, this situation is not unfamiliar. The refusal to fully acknowledge black victimization is ever-present in our sociopolitical discourse. Consistently, black people are blamed for and told to take responsibility for their own poverty, poor education, and general oppression in the United States, an argument that altogether ignores the reality that there were never adequate programs and provisions to put blacks on equal footing as whites after slavery and Jim Crow.

Moreover, the continued refusal to criminalize white people for black death continues to suggest to black people that there will never be any justice for them in the United States. Officer Wilson will likely be absolved of wrongdoing, and substantive policy changes to prevent further shooting deaths of black youth will fall to the wayside.

Some detractors who speak out against protesters of the police’s handling of the Michael Brown case say that we should wait for the investigations (one by a grand jury and the other a federal civil case) to be completed.

In the United States, local law enforcement kills approximately 400 people per year. The majority of individuals targeted and killed in these altercations are minorities, and police are rarely indicted or convicted in the following investigations. Despite this pervasive use of deadly force in the line of duty, little has been done. Darren Wilson will likely walk free, and attempts to prevent future cases of deadly force will continue to be ineffective.

This denial of white criminality and black victimization, unless the black person displays some tint of exceptionalism, places black people in a double bind—they are told that they have to be successful in order to be deemed fully human but often aren’t given the resources they need to accomplish this success.

You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you never had shoes to begin with.

Temitope Agabalogun ’15 is a human evolutionary biology concentrator in Dunster House. Amanda D. Bradley ’15 is a joint sociology and government concentrator in Dunster House. Jasmine S. Burnett ’16 is a government concentrator in Lowell House.