Part 2: Effective Steps Towards Resistance (In English)

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. - Malcolm X

On January 17, we, graduate students of the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University, hosted an event called Part 2: Effective Steps Towards Resistance.

This event was the second part of the series of our struggles to overcome police brutality directed to the racially marginalized people at both local and national levels. Columbus, OH, is known as a state which has the second highest rate of killing people from the minority groups, often African Americans, by the police in United States. In terms of police brutality, the name of Ohio is often shown in the local and national media. John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, and Tanisha Anderson were the recent victims of police brutality within the state of Ohio. In this particular circumstances, it is crucial for us to re-examine the fundamental and overlooked causes of these incidents and to put forth concrete and actual strategies to improve this situation. For this reason, we started to provide places to have conversations with people from the community and to work collectively towards resistance against police brutality.

This time, we broke the audience into various task forces and we discussed actual steps and effective strategies in each groups. Those groups are composed of: Citizen Review Board, Economic Empowerment and Resistance, Media and Publicity, Education and Training, Visible Demonstrations, Policy and Legislation, and Youth Engagement. We had several people from the various organizations focusing on each area. One of our objectives was to connect people from the community with those organizations so that people who are interested in continuing their activisms can work together with other people who has similar interests.

I was in the group of Media and Publicity and we discussed some crucial elements of media in terms of police brutality. One of them was how to create the new opportunities of media outlets for the people who do not possess any access to the media. As a solution, it would be profitable to provide some community-based workshops where people can learn how to get access to those media. We also talked about the traditional ways of distributing the information as an effective way to educate and inform people of getting access to those informations. The library located in the community can be the crucial site for distributing those informations. Although we only had about an hour for discussions, we had such truly fruitful conversations which are definitely connected to the next steps.

I really appreciate people who came to our event and we do know that our struggles will continue until we will see the actual outcomes benefitting for the people who have been suffering from police brutality.