RIP Alton Sterling, Philando Castile

  Last night, I went to sleep with a lot on my mind, and at the top of it, two words: Alton Sterling.
  This morning, I woke up to find another name: Philando Castile.
  There's something wrong in this country.
  We just celebrated another US Independence Day, and as I scrolled through my Instagram feed, I couldn't bring myself to like the pictures of groups of cis white males sporting beers and American flag shorts. Because the only ones who truly enjoy those freedoms that our nation was founded on, are people who look exactly like them.
  Apparently, it isn't enough to have systematic barriers against our education, employment, housing, and standards of living in general. No, there has to be systematic barriers against our mere existence; with the law enforcement officials being the ones playing judge, jury and executioner.

  Regarding specifically the two cases that just occurred in these past few days, they both allegedly involved the victim carrying a firearm.
  And perhaps I am mistaken, but isn't that the same issue that so many Americans have been arguing about? The "war on guns"? Did the NRA forget that killing an individual simply for having a weapon is also an attack on Americans' right to own a firearm? Or did I forget that the amendment that the organization bases its existence on is a decree that, in its inception, only applied to the white men that occupy the nation...?

  When considering our state of racial affairs, I can't help but to look at other recent systematic killings of specified groups of people--think Rwanda and Burundi with the Tutsi, Iraq with the Kurdish people, Bosnia with its Muslim population, ect. And a common aspect of them are that these systematic killings were for the most part sanctioned by some segment of a government, be it the ruling party or a revolutionary administration. However, this doesn't seem to be the case with the occurrences in the United States. It is terrifying to think that it isn't a political regime or campaign that is carrying out these killings, but individuals...which lends itself to say that it is the culture that is the driving force of these heinous acts. To me, that means that something is wrong with the way the American culture views people of color, specifically the black population. Of course, what is happening in our nation is nowhere near the scale of what happened other nations like the ones I named above (unless you are counting the mass incarceration of blacks); but from my perspective, the resemblance is striking.


 My head hurts and my heart aches.