Essay on discrimination – part 1
Soon after the third year started in April 1992, we saw the news about a riot in Los Angeles. A video was released of a man named Rodney King, pulled out of his car and beaten by police officers, not just a few of them but what looked like more than a dozen of them. From the way the media reported the incident, I understood that enraged African Americans led the riot. I was shocked by how violent the police were towards a non-resistant person. Their brutality looked almost personal, way beyond their professional duty.
Sometime that year, I was asked by my class teacher to enter into an essay contest. The topic was “discrimination.” I quickly figured they chose the subject because of the LA riot. But at 15 and living in a rural town in Japan, I had not known that behind the riot, there was a long history of lynching and police brutality toward African Americans in the U.S and that they were angry not just for one person but for the whole race, for themselves.
With a writing paper in front of me, I struggled. Most of the time, I had an opinion or two about the world I lived in, which radius limited to about 30 miles. This essay topic was too immense a scale. I wrote down, “I think Eddy Murphy is a great actor.” And no more words came out.