Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.
Having my mom give me a lecture before I left for a party seemed like a waste of time. But deep down, I knew what she was saying was the truth. I was walking on Mission Street, listening to music on my headphones and the cops stopped me. They thought since I was an African American and because I had a Rockstar energy drink in my hands, I was drinking. I was frisked and questioned without reason. This was a form of police brutality because I am an innocent person who was harassed by the the cops. Police brutality is a problem that needs to be stopped because it is destroying homes and lives. Many of the people being targeted by this type of policebrutality are people of color.
Many African Americans are being targeted by the police. Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician said, “Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.” This quote shows how white people will never fully understand what communities of color are going through. For a problem like this to change, other races need to at least try to understand what we are going through and fight along with us.
How many more lives is it going to take for us to rise up against police brutality? I should not be scared to wear certain things in public and be seen as a bad person or a gang member because of the color of my skin. Since I am a Black male, I feel targeted by law enforcement, and I’ve made it my business to lower my hood, or take it off before I leave my house.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.