Today on the Real Life English with Gabby podcast, we've got a heavy one in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.
Day coming up soon.
Today, I'll be teaching you 20 high-level words for racism in the USA.
You'll be learning words like oppression, abolition, redlining, implicit bias, and more.
Let's get to it.
Hey there, welcome to the RealLife English with Gabby podcast.
I'm your host, Gabby, your fun and friendly English teacher from the one and only New York City.
My goal is to teach you phrasal verbs, idioms and slang that will help you speak English confidently and understand real American conversations.
Are you ready to improve your English skills?
Let's jump right in.
Hey there.
Greetings from New York City.
This episode is a big one that I am honestly honored to do.
You know, in my classroom I love to have a family style environment, meaning my students feel comfortable asking lots of different questions about lots of different topics.
And I encourage this because I truly want English learners to understand all aspects of American culture and learning English.
And one of the most popular topics is racism.
Racism is a very big social issue, social problem here in the USA.
And my students typically have a lot of questions, whether it's things that they see on the news, like Black Lives Matter or the more common one, police shootings, police killing people or other crazy videos that show racism, racist attacks, racist behavior.
Racism in the USA is very different than racism in most other countries, mainly because here it's in every single aspect of our culture, which you'll hear more about in the episode.
This episode is a bit different because, instead of creating a fictional story that shares the definitions with you in context, I'm going to walk you through a brief history of racism in the USA and then share in detail explanations and real-life examples afterward.
As most of you know, every episode comes with a free study guide that you can use to practice what you heard in the episode.
In today's study guide there will be a little bit more than usual, because I'm gonna have some resources for those of you who want to learn more.
It's going to include TV shows and movies that you can watch and books you can read.
You'll be able to learn more about this topic while also improving your English.
One of the main resources that I'm going to recommend to you is a documentary called 13th.
I actually do a lesson about this with my students.
This documentary is is going to literally blow your mind just as it blew mine.
It is a comprehensive documentary and it's very interesting.
It was actually nominated for an Academy Award a few years ago.
It's fascinating.
It just shows so many facts about racism in the United States, prison culture, police.
It's amazing.
You can see it on Netflix, but it is also on YouTube.
I will link it in the resources in the study guide.
But I should say that Netflix has better subtitles, better captions, and this is definitely a tough watch.
The words that they use are very big.
I watch it with B2 students and there was a lot of vocabulary that we'd have to unpack, but it's amazing vocabulary for your high level English.
Like this is some C1, C2 type vocabulary.
It's phenomenal.
Make sure you watch it.
And I will reference it a few times throughout the episode.
To get the study guide, click the link in the episode description and from there it'll bring you on the path to download the study guide.
You'll notice that this episode shifts the focus from phrasal verbs, idioms and slang to higher level academic vocabulary.
These are words that are very important within American culture.
After listening to this episode, I'm hoping that you'll come away with a deeper understanding of American culture, as well as an understanding of the impact that racism has on many Americans.
Try to keep an open mind during this episode, because you're going to hear a lot of new information and honestly, some of it will shock you.
I grew up in the United States and I had a great childhood.
I loved my country.
I grew up as a patriot in university.
Before I studied teaching English in graduate school, I actually studied history.
I may have mentioned this in some previous episodes that in my first four years of university I was studying pre-med biology and history.
So I actually have a bachelor's degree in history with a concentration on American history.
So this topic is very, very interesting to me.
I love the history of the United States, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
You may notice that there's a lot of different types of conversations in American politics surrounding racism.
There are some who deny racism.
There are some who admit that there's racism, but say that slavery did not impact the current lives of Black Americans or other Americans of color, including Latinos Asians, Arabs.
The list goes on.
So it is somewhat of a controversial topic in some circles, but today I'm going to present you with some facts.
All right, before we get into the story, let me tell you the 20 words expressions, events that you're going to hear about today.
Oppression.
Fight back.
There are a few phrasal verbs, as you can see.
Abolition.
The Underground Railroad.
Call out.
Emancipation Proclamation.
Discrimination.
Jim Crow and Jim Crow laws.
Segregation. redlining, lynchings, the KKK, civil rights movement, nonviolence, Montgomery bus boycott, March on Washington, institutionalized racism, systemic racism, implicit bias, racial profiling, and lastly, BLM, Black Lives Matter.
Now, as I said, I'm not going to read a fictional story.
I'm going to read a history of racism in the United States and it will have all of these 20 words within it.
Here we go.
The history of racism against Black people in the United States is long and painful.
It began with slavery, when millions of Africans were stolen from their homes and forced to live and work in terrible conditions.
They were treated as property, not as people.
And many families were separated. slavery helped build the economy, especially in the South.
This system of racial oppression built the economic foundation of the United States, particularly in the South.
In the 19th century, people started to fight back against slavery.
This movement was called abolition.
Many brave people worked together to form the Underground Railroad, which was a system that created secret routes and safe houses to help enslaved people escape to freedom, mostly in the North.
Abolitionists began to call out slavery and put pressure on the government to end it.
In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
This is one of the most important documents in US history because it declared freedom for enslaved people in the Confederate Southern states.
Two years later, in 1865, the 13th Amendment was added to the American Constitution.
This amendment ended slavery, but freedom did not mean equality.
After slavery ended, Black Americans faced new forms of discrimination.
During the period after the war which was called Reconstruction, there was hope for change, but many resisted, specifically white Americans from the South.
By the late 1800s, Jim Crow laws were created to enforce segregation in the South.
These laws separated black and white people in schools, restaurants, buses, and more.
The idea of separate but equal was a lie.
Black facilities were always worse.
Black people were also kept out of certain neighborhoods through redlining and lived in fear of violence like lynchings.
Groups like the KKK made it their goal to maintain power for the white majority through terrorism against the Black community.
In the 1950s and 60s, the civil rights movement worked to fight against racism and discrimination.
Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. used nonviolence to protest unfair laws and practices.
Events like the Montgomery bus boycott and the March on Washington helped bring attention to the injustice.
The movement achieved big victories like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made segregation illegal, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected Black people's right to vote.
Even though the civil rights movement brought important changes, racism didn't end.
Today, institutionalized racism still affects Black Americans in many ways.
For example, police shootings of unarmed Black children, women and men, and inequalities in jobs schools, housing and healthcare.
Implicit bias, where people judge others without realizing it, and racial profiling, where people are treated unfairly because of their race, are still problems as well.
Movements like Black Lives Matter work to bring attention to these issues and demand justice.
The fight against racism continues, but progress has been made thanks to the courage of many people throughout American history.
All right, there is a lot to unpack here in this episode.
First, I just want to say a lot of these issues are not really taught well in school.
American history is an interesting topic in most schools.
So if you didn't know, education has no big national standards.
We have small national standards, but every state determines what the students in that state learn.
So for American history, for example, states like New York, we learn a lot of honest history there.
But there are a lot of states that learn, I'll say, positive history.
Like, for example, most Americans grow up thinking that the United States did not lose the Vietnam War.
My father loves history.
He loves military history specifically, especially, I should say.
So I grew up knowing the real deal about the Vietnam War.
But most Americans think, oh, we didn't lose.
We just we pulled out.
Things like that.
We tend to make our history sound better than it is.
And I know many countries do that.
But you know, things like killing off the native population here in the United States slavery colonialization, countries that we have destroyed, interfered with.
A lot of it is, you know, painted over and made to look positive, hence why many americans grow up thinking we're the greatest country in the world.
You know all that stuff, all right, so a lot of americans.
Some of the things in this would be new information for them.
Okay, so first let's talk about oppression.
This is not just a word for racism.
In fact, I'm sure many of you have heard the word oppression.
This is a common word used throughout the history of the world.
Oppression is unjust, unfair treatment or control of a group of people over a long period of time.
So we say prolonged.
People of color in the United States, meaning non-white Americans, have faced oppression for a long time.
Now, for me, I am Latina.
I was born in the United States, but both of my families are of Latino origin.
For someone like me.
I have not really experienced too much racism to my face, but my father has a lot when he was growing up in the 60s and 70s.
My husband has.
My husband is also Latino.
His family is from Ecuador, but he's American.
He was born here.
And I will get into that later, actually.
All right, so let's get back to oppression.
Oppression is just a prolonged unfair treatment of people.
All right, the next word is a phrasal verb and it is fight back.
Fight back is to resist or to defend yourself against injustice.
American history, and a lot of your country's history as well, is people fighting back against oppression.
Our whole country started because we fought back against the British, right?
That's why the United States of America even exists.
An example would be the civil rights movement used protests and legal action to fight back against mistreatment of Black Americans.
And I have to say, thankfully, fighting back in the United States, it works.
It works a lot.
Next up, we have the term abolition.
Abolition is huge.
So abolition is the act of ending some kind of system, practice or institution that oppresses people.
It is the act of ending slavery.
So the abolition movement was a movement that started in the northern states, and it was where people began to realize that slavery was morally wrong.
They were looking at how Black men, women and children were treated And they started to think it actually started with northern Christians in churches, because they were realizing, from a Christian perspective, God created all people equally.
And so it started to catch fire, we say, and it started to spread throughout the country.
And people who were a part of this movement were called abolitionists.
And it was really a turning point in American history.
And the abolition movement is what ultimately led to slavery being ended.
Now, during the abolition movement, we had a really awesome part of American history the Underground Railroad.
This was a secret network of people and routes that helped enslaved people escape the South and get to the North where they had freedom.
So in the South, if a slave escaped, the person who found them had to return them to the slave owner because again they were property.
But in the North, the rules were different.
The laws in the North stated that if a slave was free, he was free.
No questions asked.
They would not be returned to the South.
So the Underground Railroad, one of the most famous participants was a woman named Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman was actually an escape slave.
She had gotten her freedom by escaping, and she went back immediately to rescue her family.
And then she just kept going back and back and back.
Harriet Tubman was really amazing.
She also fought during the American Civil War as a spy for the Union Army.
She is actually now on our currency.
She helped hundreds of slaves reach safety in the North.
Basically, people's houses would be underground railroad stops, stations.
In some cases, they did build underground tunnels.
But in other situations, it was just people's houses.
They had secret rooms where they would hide slaves.
The history of the Underground Railroad is so amazing.
I highly recommend you look more into this.
Next up, we have the phrasal verb call out.
Call out means to publicly criticize or draw attention to something that you believe is wrong.
For example, abolitionists called out slavery during the 19th century.
Next up is the Emancipation Proclamation.
Emancipation is freedom, okay?
A proclamation is like an announcement.
The Emancipation Proclamation, as you heard in the story, was one of the most important documents in American history.
It was an order that was issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
And it declared that all the enslaved people in the southern states called Confederate states were free.
Now, this happened during the Civil War.
So it's a very, very intense topic.
The American Civil War was from 1861 to 1865.
It was the northern states versus the southern Confederate states.
In the middle of the war, Abraham Lincoln declared freedom for slaves in the southern states, because the northern states were already free.
This didn't immediately impact slaves in the South, because their owners were like you're not our president.
We don't care.
We're in a war.
But it paved the way.
The path was set for abolition of slaves.
Next up, we have discrimination.
Discrimination is the unfair treatment of people based on characteristics like race gender, religion.
In English, racism is based on someone's race.
So white, black, Asian, we could say native, indigenous, okay?
And then, you know, you have Arab.
Latino is not a race, but you know we kind of group it in there because it's for a large group of people.
Discrimination, however, can be for race, but it can also be for gender.
Discrimination against women, for example, or discrimination against Muslims, discrimination against Christians, discrimination against Hindus.
It can be for a lot of different factors.
All right, next is something that we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about.
Jim Crow laws.
So the power dynamic in the United States when slavery was ended, the white majority was going to lose some of its power.
So Jim Crow laws were enacted because many of these people still saw black people as property, as animals, as savages.
So Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the South.
Let's talk about segregation.
Segregation is the forced separation of racial groups in both public and private spaces.
These laws were not in the North.
The North was way more accepting.
Yay, New York City.
Yay, North.
Anyway, black and white people were required to use separate facilities many, many separate facilities.
So let's talk about this a little bit, okay, about what Jim Crow laws were.
So when I say that racism in the United States is different than racism in many countries, this is what I mean.
It's institutionalized.
It's systemic.
It's in our systems, in our laws.
Here are some things that Jim Crow laws enforced.
Number one, segregated schools.
Black kids in one school, white kids in another.
And of course, black schools were underfunded, overcrowded.
Lacked resources.
Separate public transportation, buses, trains, streetcars, whites in the front, blacks in the back.
We're going to talk a little bit about this more.
Segregated public facilities, restrooms, drinking fountains, waiting rooms.
Everything would have signs.
You can look up on Google pictures of segregated United States, white only or colored.
Now, I want to address something here.
Even though most of this was for black people.
There were two categories white and colored, meaning that if you were not white, you were colored.
So Asians, Latinos, Arabs, Indians, indigenous people, all with the colored folks.
Now, in the South really, the main colored folks were black, because a lot of the other groups stayed in the North.
But let's continue.
One of the biggest types of Jim Crow were voting restrictions.
After slavery, there was a constitutional amendment that gave Black Americans the right to vote.
But a lot of local governments, state governments, were not happy about this.
So they made laws that prevented Black people from voting.
Let me give you some examples.
Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses.
Now...
Let me explain what these are.
Number one, in order to vote you had to take a literacy test.
Well, guess what?
A lot of freed slaves had not been taught to read.
And so even as they were getting educated, these literacy tests were very difficult.
Next, poll taxes.
They would charge money to vote.
Crazy, right?
And a lot of Black Americans, former slaves, they were having a hard time finding jobs.
They couldn't pay.
And the last one was a grandfather clause, meaning that you could only vote if your grandfather had been able to vote before the Civil War.
There were very few free blacks in the South before the Civil War.
This was just a way to keep blacks from getting power.
Now, guys, these were the laws, the official laws.
This was not discrimination from an organization.
This was the law.
It was in the institutions.
It was in the systems.
Another Jim Crow law was interracial marriage bans.
This was big.
And in fact, lasted until 1967.
Blacks and whites could not get married.
Entertainment.
Blacks and whites couldn't sit together in theaters, parks.
They couldn't watch sports. beaches, hospitals.
But guys, the craziest thing is cemeteries where people are buried.
Black people couldn't even be buried with white people, even in death.
There were also separate military units.
There are a few famous black American soldier units like the Tuskegee Airmen.
They had to train separately.
And of course, workplace segregation.
Blacks could only have certain jobs.
And of course, restaurants.
Restaurants could not be mixed.
They were segregated.
This is all really crazy, I know.
But here's what's crazier, okay?
What's crazier is that this didn't end until the 1960s.
We're going to talk more about this shortly.
All right.
So next, let's talk about something called redlining.
Redlining is a discriminatory practice where banks refuse loans to people who live in neighborhoods with other people of color.
So let's break this down.
In the United States.
You want a loan, you go to a bank, they give you a loan to buy a house and you pay the bank back.
Now, redlining means that if somebody wants to buy a house in a neighborhood that has mostly black people, they were not given loans.
And in the past, remember that they were only allowed to live in certain areas.
Throughout history, it's been proven that core white families were approved, while richer black families were not.
This is another way that racism here is systemic, because in the United States one of the fastest ways to get wealthy is through ownership, real estate.
Now, I want to tell you something even crazier.
Bank of America about 10 years ago was caught still practicing redlining, where they would not approve loans to black families who had the same exact criteria as white families.
It was a big, big scandal.
All right, the next word is lynchings.
This is a terrible, terrible thing.
A lynching is a public execution, typically by hanging, and it's carried out by mobs, typically to terrorize Black people.
Thousands of Black Americans were lynched in the United States between 1880s and 1960s.
And if you watch the 13th documentary, you'll learn a little bit about this.
But basically, any time that anyone accused a black man of doing something, instead of receiving a fair trial they would just drag him through the city and lynch him on a tree.
And there are so many photos.
Documentation like this was a regular occurrence throughout the southern states.
And let me tell you this.
When President Obama was elected president, the same day that he was elected, people had Obama dolls that they were lynching.
You can Google it and you will see these Obama dolls with a noose, which is the rope that they use to hang dolls people.
It's crazy.
They even have signs that say Obama's name with a noose, the symbol of lynchings.
The U.S. is crazy.
Okay, next is something that I'm sure most of you are familiar with, and that is the KKK.
So it's three K's, triple K, the Ku Klux Klan.
Ku Klux Klan is the most famous white supremacy group in the United States.
White supremacy or a white supremacist.
This is the belief that white people are superior to every other racial group and that whites should politically economically, socially dominate the culture.
The KKK has been around for a very long time.
After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, they were a big terrorist group.
Many mayors, governors, presidents, many politicians were secret members of the KKK.
And so that'll kind of tell you how and why the country has so much racism still.
Because if the police chiefs are racist, if the principals of schools are racist, if the governors, it's a deadly cycle.
Now, I also want to talk about neo-Nazis.
Usually my students are horrified when they hear about this, especially my European students, because of how prevalent the Nazi movement is.
Now, in English, the word neo, N-E-O, means new.
We have a very popular group called the neo-Nazis, and the neo-Nazis have Nazi ideology, where they believe that the Aryan race is the primary race.
So it's one type of white supremacy.
They go back to the time of Hitler.
And the craziest thing is that there are politicians who run under the flag of the neo-Nazi party.
As of right now, there are quite a few neo-Nazi members in our government.
There are many who have run and not one.
But last I checked, there were two.
And then, of course, there are others who run that are secretly KKK members or neo-Nazis.
And so it's just crazy.
When you look at the Ku Klux Klan and the terrorism tactics that they used, it's horrifying.
You may recognize them as the group that would put crosses like the cross of Jesus in a black person's yard and light it on fire.
You'll see examples of this in some of the resources that I recommended.
Next, we have the Civil Rights Movement.
Civil Rights Movement was a social and political movement, and it was from the 1950s and 60s.
And the goal was to end racial segregation and discrimination.
There are a lot of key events here that we're going to talk about, like the March on Washington, the Montgomery bus boycott.
They mostly practiced through nonviolence, which was a strategy of protesting injustice without using physical force.
There were two main leaders during the civil rights movement.
There was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was an advocate or representative of nonviolence.
And then there was Malcolm X, who believed in in force.
And so nonviolence was a very common strategy because they would do marches and sit-ins.
They would walk peacefully and they would sit peacefully and they would get arrested.
And this would bring attention because people on the news would see Black men and women with no weapons, not doing anything violent.
They were just marching down the street.
And there are so many videos that you can look at where they're just being brutalized punched hit, sometimes shot, sprayed with chemicals.
And this put the spotlight on the civil rights movement.
But let me tell you a story, a true story, that really set the civil rights movement on fire.
I'm going to tell you the story of Emmett Till, and I'm going to keep this brief.
You will definitely hear more about him if you do research.
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy.
You've got to Google a picture of him.
He's adorable.
He looks like he's 10.
He went into a store and he was accused of whistling at a white woman in the store named Carolyn Bryant.
So she was very upset at this because, you know, black and whites at the time were not supposed to engage.
And so either he spoke to her or he whistled at her.
Nobody knows.
She was upset and she went home and told her husband.
What happened next was that her husband and his brother, armed with weapons, went to his house while everyone was sleeping and they took him.
They beat him and they mutilated him, meaning they destroyed his face, his body.
And then they shot him in the head and they threw his body in the river.
He was missing for three days and then his body was discovered by the river.
Now here is why this set the civil rights movement on fire.
His body was returned and his mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket because she wanted everyone to see the effects of racism and racism, the savageness of lynching and violence.
And so tens of thousands of people attended his funeral because word had spread.
But more than that, images of his mutilated body were published in magazines and newspapers.
And it just rallied support and sympathy from whites and blacks all over the country.
Now, of course, the people who did it, they had an all-white jury and they were found not guilty.
Now, later...
In 1956 they did an interview with a magazine and they admitted that they tortured and murdered him and they sold the story to the newspaper for 4000.
We have a law in the United States called double jeopardy, that you can't be tried for the same case twice.
So because they were found not guilty, they could never be tried again.
So unfortunately, they got away with murder.
And that was unfortunately not the last time an unarmed Black child was killed for no reason.
The next term is actually an event, and it is the Montgomery Bus Boycott Act.
As you may or may not know, the word boycott is very common in the U.S.
It's a form of protest where people refuse to buy or use goods or services from a specific country, company country organization, etc.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a year-long protest against bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama.
This was sparked by the famous Rosa Parks.
Now, if you have not heard the story of Rosa Parks, she refused to sit in the back of the bus, which is where Black people were supposed to sit.
So on buses, Black men, women and children were designated or forced to sit in the back and whites sat in the front.
Rosa Parks refused to move to the back and was arrested.
And this caused Black Americans to boycott the bus system, making the bus system lose tons of money.
And actually, this led to the desegregation of the bus system.
After this, people were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted on the bus.
Next, we have the March on Washington.
This is one of the most significant events in American history.
This was a huge demonstration in 1963, where over 250000 people black and white gathered to advocate for civil rights.
I'm sure you've seen tons of pictures from this event.
This is where Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech, I Have a Dream.
This event brought national attention to the civil rights movement and it really influenced laws that impacted the country in a good way.
If you want to see pictures, definitely google this.
The pictures are very inspiring.
If you've never heard the martin luther king jr speech, it is everywhere.
I highly recommend it.
Next, we have institutionalized or systemic racism.
Now, we've talked about this throughout the episode, but just to give it an official definition, this is racial discrimination that is embedded or deep in laws, policies and practices.
Redlining, segregation, these are all examples of institutionalized racism.
Jim Crow laws are examples.
These are all examples of institutionalized racism.
This is why it's very difficult to fight against racism in the United States, because here it's more likely that the racism comes from the laws and the government.
So it's more difficult to fight.
Next, we have a very, very important term called implicit bias.
Implicit bias is a very high level term.
This is attitudes or stereotypes that you make unconsciously.
You don't even realize them.
They affect your decision making.
Research shows that implicit bias influences hiring decisions at companies police practices.
Let me give you an example of implicit bias.
I want you to imagine that you're walking and a black man walks behind you.
Are you scared?
Do you hold your purse next to you?
Or what about employees in a store?
When a Black person walks in, the employee's watching them more closely.
They've done so many experiments.
It happens here.
Maybe it doesn't happen in your country, but it happens here.
So one of the things here was stereotypes.
There are a lot of stereotypes about different countries, and people who stereotype are showing implicit bias.
Next, we have racial profiling.
Racial profiling is when you target someone for suspicion for committing a crime, doing something bad, based on their race or ethnicity.
This is a very, very complex thing here in the United States.
Police often stop black drivers more frequently than white drivers.
Let me tell you about a law that we had in New York City years ago called Stop and Frisk.
Frisk is when you feel someone, like an airport, they pat your body down to check for weapons.
Stop and Frisk basically stated that anyone who looked suspicious could be stopped by the police.
So who do you think police stopped more of?
Black men or white men?
Black men.
Now, let me tell you.
I know so many white Americans who smoke marijuana.
So many.
And it's legal in New York now, but it was illegal.
Can I tell you that maybe, if you're asking 20 white men, if the police ever stopped them, they'd say no.
Now, go now to 20 black men.
How many do you think out of 20 have been stopped by police?
It's about 15.
So they ended up stopping the practice because they were looking at statistics and they were saying in one day, if a police officer pulls 100 people to the side, 90 of those people are black.
Why is that?
It was an unfair law.
Now, let me tell you something else.
My husband is Latino, as I said.
His skin is lighter than mine.
I have light brown skin.
His skin is lighter than mine, but he's clearly Latino when you look at him.
However, he also looks Arab.
I can pass for Arab too.
Many people ask me if I'm Egyptian, if I'm Moroccan.
When I went to Morocco, everyone thought I was Moroccan until they heard me speak.
My husband has been racially profiled multiple times just because someone committed a crime who was Latino.
Maybe they didn't even look like him.
And they pulled him to the side.
I'll never forget one time.
This is before we were married.
I was meeting him near the World Trade Center, which is where the train station was.
And he was supposed to meet me.
I didn't hear from him for like 20 minutes after he had told me he was walking towards me.
And I got so scared.
I didn't know where he was.
And he called me 20, 30 minutes later. and told me that the police were holding him.
He was really scared.
They had 10 guys who looked nothing alike, up against the wall because a man who appeared to be of Arab descent did something.
I don't know what they did.
And they stopped.
All these guys had them against the wall, telling them to put their hands behind their backs.
And it's a very scary situation.
And this happens very often with non-white people, unfortunately.
The last term is BLM, Black Lives Matter.
Now, Black Lives Matter became really popular during COVID.
This is a movement advocating for the rights and lives of Black people, but specifically against police brutality.
Now, the BLM movement really became popular after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
George Floyd was a man who paid at the store with a fake 20 bill and the store owners called the police and the police killed him.
One of the police officers put him in a chokehold and killed him.
He had no weapons, and the whole thing is on video.
Now let me just talk for a bit about police brutality.
As you know from previous episodes, I come from a police family.
Three of my uncles were police officers.
One of my cousins is currently a deputy in Florida.
I grew up loving the police, thinking that the police mostly were keeping us safe.
I've personally never had an issue with police.
However, the age of social media that we are in has shed a lot of light on police brutality, which is police harming unarmed mostly black men, but also black women and black children.
There are many, many cops, police officers. who want to do good, and they want to protect and serve.
But unfortunately the system that they're in statistically proves that unarmed Black men get killed by police more than unarmed white men.
The statistics are there.
It's just a scary, scary reality of the United States.
But I'm going to tell you one story about a kid named Tamir Rice.
I always talk to my students about this and I show them the video.
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old black boy.
He was shot and killed by a white police officer in 2014.
He was playing with a toy gun with his friend at the park.
And someone called the police.
And let me tell you, you can watch the video.
The video is blurry, so you're not going to see blood or anything like that.
But you can see what happened is a police officer pulled up within three seconds, pulls up, gets out of the car, shoots him.
He dies.
They never help him.
Now, this violates every single American law.
Every single American law.
Police are supposed to stop.
They're supposed to say, put your hands up.
They're supposed to wait.
And then if someone resists, then they're supposed to try to stop them in any way.
But shooting someone is supposed to be the last resort.
Now, here's the craziest thing, okay?
The officer who shot Tamir Rice was fired from his job.
However, he was not charged criminally.
So to this day, he's alive and walking around.
When this precious little 12-year-old was playing with a toy gun and lost his life.
And so, unfortunately, this is the injustice that the United States is experiencing.
Now, are there changes?
Yes.
The police officers responsible for George Floyd's death were found guilty.
And that is rare because it's not just the police killing unarmed black men.
It's the fact that they were never found guilty, so they were allowed to get away with it.
Another story of a man who was a soldier, a black soldier.
His name was Fitzgerald Bradford.
He was, listen to this, okay?
He was at a mall.
There was a mass shooter at the mall.
And this kid Fitzgerald Bradford.
He was home for the holidays, for Thanksgiving and And he held out his gun legally owned gun to stop the shooter.
And the police came and shot him three times in the back.
He was shot in the head, the neck, and the back.
And he died.
And so, you know, again, nobody told him drop his weapon.
When you shoot someone in the back, they're not trying to fight.
But were they found guilty?
No.
So unfortunately, this is something that happens very often in American culture.
Now, this episode, it's not meant to bring sadness.
Instead, it's meant to bring awareness and understanding.
Hopefully now you have a different picture of the United States and it helps you understand why there is so much tension between between police and regular citizens, why there's so much racial tension.
Unfortunately, now, because of some political conversations, racism has come up a lot.
You know, racism towards Latinos, towards Asians, towards Arabs and Muslims.
And this is from politicians.
And so I have to say though, that I see a lot of hope in the United States with the younger generations.
I have two kids, and it's just beautiful how kids...
They're not born racist.
And so I have a lot of hope for the United States.
If you've made it to the end of the episode.
I'm very proud of you, because this is a very difficult topic.
It's very eye-opening.
It's very heavy.
So I applaud you for listening to the end.
And I encourage you to continue to do research, continue to learn, because you can bring this back to your country and it can make you a better person and help you fight as well.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode.
Well, that's a wrap for today's episode of the Real Life English with Gabby podcast.
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