Students: ‘we find this all really sad’

We are students at Kenwood High School. Though we seem small and have little power at this time in history, our views of how our history is playing out matter. This is our personal take on how we feel about the Trump supporters invading the Capitol on Jan. 6 (“Congress certifies Joe Biden’s Electoral College win hours after violent pro-Trump mob storms US Capitol,” Jan. 7). Before we even talk about this, we have little interest in politics, and most of us at this point in our young lives don’t consider ourselves a liberal or conservative or whatever. We’re speaking from the perspective of a teenagers. Biracial, white and Black teenagers. We speak to you as one voice.

From our teenager viewpoint we find this all really sad. We find it sad that we didn’t defend the Capitol against white people but when a minority is peacefully protesting they get Maced, tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, and beat with batons. Even when minorities aren’t doing anything it feels like we get abused and even murdered. We wish that every disagreement we’ve seen in our short lives didn’t have to result in war and violence. There seems to be this ongoing battle between the old beliefs and the new beliefs on what equality even is and should look like, and we answer that disagreement with more violence.

To the future, we’re talking to you. We want a future where we’re not brutalized for peaceful protesting. We want a future where our race, our gender, our sexuality doesn’t affect how we are treated. We want a future where every minority in the US of A is not called minorities anymore, but people instead. We need a future where we support each other as one nation or community with individual unique qualities.

We want a future with change, and nobody can change that future but us! We are proving to be the most open minded generation and that will be needed for change. We need to put in the effort to change the future. We have to create a new normal but we must decide what that is and how it will be. The path we’re on is scary, but we must learn from ourselves in the present and do and be better for the future.

Azreil Williamson, Starr Crawford, Mikayla Gillum and Jasmine Ramos The writers are students at Kenwood High School in Baltimore County.