Black students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of the Parkland, Florida school shooting, gathered this week to ask the media and policymakers to consider not just the voices of their white classmates, but their voices, too, the Miami Herald reports.
3,000 students attend Stoneman Douglas; 11 percent of those students are black.
"I am here today with my classmates because we have been thoroughly underrepresented and in some cases, misrepresented," black student Tyah-Amo Roberts said at the press conference, CBS 12 reports.
Fellow student Kai Koerber said that one way the black students had been left out was in discussions about increasing the police presence at the school. Many of Stoneman Douglas' black student now no longer fear being shot bey a fellow student, but instead by one of their school's police officers.
“It’s bad enough we have to return with clear backpacks,” Koerber said. “Should we also return with our hands up?”
Black Lives Matter activist Tifanny Burks said that when the school's black students came back for classes and found the campus full of police, “They were shook. It felt like there was a thousand police there.” Burks added, “Having all those police there made their school feel like a prison.”
"It is estimated that one in three police officers suffer from undiagnosed Post Traumatic stress disorder," Koerber said. "When mentally ill police officers are tasked to safeguard a traumatized student body, that becomes a recipe for disaster ― police need to stand on the perimeters of our school. Those chosen to work at school should receive PTSD counseling and special diversity training."
Koerber added that many minority students fear that the new officers will view them as "potential criminals.”
Tyah-Amoy a Marjorie Stoneman Douglas student said conversations about gun violence have to include police violence. She asked, the same people who showed up for #MarchForOurLives–will they show up for #StephonClark? #AltonSterling? #SandraBland? pic.twitter.com/QIhvy9gYHD
— Nadege C. Green (@NadegeGreen) March 28, 2018
Reverend Rosalind Osgood, a Broward County school board member helped to organize the press conference with the black students, and said it was imperative to include black students in the conversation about gun laws and school safety.
“I don’t want the minority kids to be angry and feel that they’re being ignored,” Osgood said. “I don’t think anybody’s intentionally excluding them, but nobody’s intentionally including them either.”
The solution, Osgood said, is to "find means and modes to make [black students'] voices available, so they can be heard."
Roberts wondered just what those means and modes might be.
"The Black Lives Matter movement has been addressing the topic since the murder of Travon Martin in 2012," Roberts said. "We have never seen this kind of support for our cause, we surely do not feel that the lives or voices of minorities are valued as much as those of our white counterparts."
Burks said that any change will have to begin with a conversation.
“Is the solution to less gun violence more guns, just with police officers’ names on them?” Burks asked. “We have to have that conversation.”
