A front-row seat to #BlackLivesMatter, 2020

Veronica Muriga ’22 is an electrical engineering and computer science major from Nairobi, Kenya. Find her summary of the petition supporting Black lives at MIT, as well as resources for becoming antiracist, here. 

Excerpt

I'm an aspiring engineer with many passions. But to some people, simply being Black and female makes me inherently lazy, inferior, and undeserving.

Before coming to the States for college, I had never gone beyond the borders of Kenya. While I had expected some level of culture shock, I wasn’t prepared for the jarring reality of being Black in America. Sure, I had skimmed through US Black history in my high school lessons, so I was familiar with the basics—slavery and its abolition, the civil rights movement, school desegregation. I had read of police brutality in horror, but Black Lives Matter was just a hashtag that I didn’t fully understand. Back home we face white supremacy too, but it takes different, often subtle forms, such as economic neo-­colonialism. And then I came to America, and I saw the racism behind the hashtag firsthand.

Image: Andre Daquina