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Reflective Essay: The Man Who Shot Michael Brown

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I was sixteen years old when I was first confronted with tangible evidence of evil as I looked through a glass wall at the severed braids of Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. I had heard stories about the Holocaust in school and saw pictures of camp survivors prior to arriving, but as tears covered my cheeks I realized that dry recitals of facts and frozen images were completely inadequate to convey the depth of suffering experienced in that place. Nothing could have prepared me to see hundreds of neatly labelled suitcases which were never intended to reach their destinations or to walk into shower rooms and imagine the screams of children my age as they choked on poison gas. I looked at the German students visiting the memorial with me and realized that the “monsters” who had been at work during the Third Reich, the grandparents of many of my friends, were people just like me. I was unable to comprehend the type of hatred that could drive thousands of otherwise “normal” individuals to systematically isolate, torture, and seek to eradicate an entire ethnic group. The vague interest I previously had in human behavior transformed into a driving passion to discover why people do the things they do – a passion that lingers with me today as I observe …show more content…

Theories describing social stratification and data documenting inequality became vividly relevant to me as I watched police in riot gear confronting angry African American protestors in a city just miles from my home. As my initial shock faded I decided to take advantage of my last years as an undergraduate student to break down the false impressions I had developed through years of “colorblind”

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