In Wednesday’s edition of the Technician, News Editor Inez Nicholson wrote about the school resource officer who was fired last week after throwing a black student across the classroom at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Nicholson, who also attended Spring Valley High, writes about the mentorship that Officer Ben Fields provided to fellow students and blames the media for only focusing on the five seconds in which he did throw a student and for ignoring the “external circumstances.” In addition to the fact that the girl could have sustained serious injuries by the way she was physically handled, what Nicholson’s argument ignores is the structural racism that continues to exist in today’s society. Nicholson’s argument contends that the media are to blame for the relationship between the police force and citizenry instead of talking about how Fields violated police procedure when he flipped the student and threw her across the classroom in an attempt to discipline an unruly student. Fields was rightly dismissed, and yes there have been media sources that have attempted to put this story in the broader narrative of the mistreatment of black people in this country by police officers, but it would be wrong and historically ignorant not to do so. Relations between black people and police officers in this country aren’t getting worse because the media is deciding to shine a light on the problem now. It’s just that now we as a society are starting to pay attention to the problem with a wider lens instead of treating each incident as singular and unrelated to a broader problem. Instead of blaming this deity-like entity called the media, let’s not look away from those whose civil rights are being violated and whose rights as citizens are being taken away from them. Let’s instead listen to the pleas and calls of the “Black Lives Matter” movement and look to build strong coalitions between communities of color and law enforcement.
Ravi K. Chittilla,
senior studying economics
Editor-in-Chief of the Technician, 2014-2015
