In My Own Words: Addressing Racial Injustice is a blog series featuring NAU student-athletes providing their stories, experiences and opinions in their own words. NAU Athletics is proud to provide Lumberjack student-athletes with a platform for their voices to be heard in the continued fight for racial equality in the United States. This week: NAU men's basketball junior Cameron Shelton.
The pain of living in a country where men, women, boys and girls, have died simply because they look like you is a pain unlike any other. Sometimes it can even feel unbearable. We have seen 400 years of blood, murder, racism, disenfranchisement, and suffering from a country that we have done nothing to but love. We must work twice, or even three times as hard for the same opportunities that are afforded to others at birth. We've been told that we don't belong in a country that was built on our backs. We've been shown that our lives don't matter in a country that wouldn't exist without them. We have historically looked at as less than, our intelligence has been insulted, and our talents and voices have been suppressed.
Our blackness may even be looked at as a curse to some, but that could not be further from the truth. Being black is a gift, a superpower, and a blessing. Because despite all our struggles, we win, we love, we fight, and we overcome. We do this because we are strong. It took strength to survive in the bottoms of slave ships, the same strength that it took to come back after we were beaten and arrested for sitting at a diner, the same strength that we used to rebuild our communities after they were burned to the ground, the same strength that it takes to get up and go forward after another one of us has been killed in cold blood just for being black. That is the strength that we use to create a better and brighter future for ourselves.
As for me, I refuse to be silenced. My ancestors worked, struggled, marched, bled and died for me to have the opportunities that I have today. I, like other black men and women with a voice, have an obligation to continue to push the culture forward. It is our duty to continue to fight for our rights, use our voice, keep breaking down barriers, running through walls and being exceptional for the generations that come behind us.
