Friday, December 3, 2021, a day like any other quickly turned sinister, and while all of my white friends quickly found solitude in police presence, I dealt with immense fear and anxiety. During the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement, I saw men and women being beaten and murdered constantly as those videos were posted and reshared by people it didn’t directly affect. Those people's well-intentioned posts caused me extreme anxiety and stress so much that I had to take a break from social media as a whole.

During this time, we do not all experience policing in the same way. As I watched my white peers give a sigh of relief as police walked into the library my anxiety shot through the roof, I understood that I wasn’t in the wrong and had nothing to do with what was going on, but sadly that means nothing, I remembered all the black and brown men and women who were completely in the right and still lost their lives which forced me to question “Will I be next?” and even if those responsible were imprisoned, I would still be dead.

I sometimes envy the leisure that comes with whiteness, the ability to understand that no matter who you are, you will be safe in the presence of police officials, a luxury I have never experienced and most likely never will. There is never a space that I can go into where my race could not be my downfall. I felt more endangered by the presence of the police than I did with an armed student in the school, and that is a problem!

The idea that I don’t feel safe at my place of education, after the events of Friday I contemplated dropping out so that I would never have to show up to school again either through transferring, switching schools, and online alternatives. But the reality is that there is no safe place for me as a black student. Prejudices and biases run rampant in the minds of many white people, including police officers. When Central High School makes decisions about the policing of our school, they need to think about our black and brown students who experience the world so differently.