Black Voices Lost in America: A History of Police Brutality & Educational Bias

Abstract

History is written by the victors, people say. Defining history between those who have "won" and "lost" even as a hypothetical phrase illustrates a power struggle, a battleground that is seemingly unseen as it happens but is written to be taught after the fact and expected to be accepted as fact. This is where I found myself in late 2021, caught in the middle of a battlefield where there were silences within my own memory and exposed traumas that I couldn't point to the beginnings of. This battlefield has been consistent with the history of black people in America, and familiar to me since early childhood, my school years, and more recently with my struggles of mental health during the height of what I dubbed "Covid University," while also being an active member of the Black Lives Matter Movement in my hometown of Rochester, New York. Instead of blindly engaging in the battle, however, I decided to reframe how I was searching for truth as it was still being debated by the public to try and absolve several issues of our present that were not unprecedented in the slightest, despite what so many believed. In this essay, I utilize first person narratives like my ancestors before me to challenge the written history in efforts of documenting voices once silenced through the brutality of omittance. By doing so, I uncovered alternative narratives that dismantle what is documented as truth within my own life, the lives of those in my community, and much more that advocated for a victimless history fighting to just have themselves heard. Here, these gaps of history revealed themselves to be tools like the locust clubs and dunce caps. I began to realize that educational bias, police brutality, and historical erasure were all one and the same, connected forms of violence used against those without the power to tell their stories because they allegedly weren't victorious of having survived a battle. Instead, I argue that here is where begin to reframe history all together as it dismantles the illusion of a battlefield and opens up the question of what was history, who decided what was and wasn't written to begin with, and how do we start to change that and hear new stories all together.