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Hillary Clinton Campaign Press Release - Where Does South Carolina Go From Here?

October 30, 2015

What happened at Spring Valley High School was appalling—and cannot happen again.

Over the past few years, the African American community has publicly endured brutality after brutality, both in South Carolina and across the nation. As a South Carolinian, an African American man, and a father, I can't stop asking myself once again: Where does my community go from here?

How do we fix the problems that keep us up at night?

I was born and raised in South Carolina. I've spent my life here, fighting to make things better in my community. I joined Hillary's campaign because of that fight.

This week, I watched in horror as a young black woman—a student at Spring Valley High School, here in my home state—was forcibly removed from her desk, thrown to the ground, and dragged across a classroom by a deputy sheriff twice her size.

The silence in that classroom spoke volumes to me. A culture of fear must have been created among these students, their teacher, and the officer. Such a fear should not exist in a place of learning.

No school should ever have a culture like this. Students deserve the right to get an education without being afraid of the very people who are put in place to protect them.

" Students deserve the right to get an education without being afraid of the very people who are put in place to protect them."

In the days since the video went viral, people have been talking about what we can do to make sure something like this never happens again—but over the past few years, that conversation has started to become commonplace. We've heard it repeated over and over again, ebbing and flowing as new acts of violence against the black community come to light.

Those words are no longer enough.

We can—and should—talk about police brutality, improving community policing, changing the culture of police forces, and finding ways to erase officer bias. But those conversations can't take the place of instituting real and tangible changes.

We have to act.

It terrifies me that my son could one day be brutalized by an authority figure for refusing to leave a classroom, arrested for correcting a wrong, or pulled over and killed because he fits a description. And I know that I am far from the only person losing sleep worrying about my child and family.

When this campaign first launched, Hillary said she was going to make sure her campaign addressed those issues that aren't making headlines but are keeping families up at night. She is working to close the school-to-prison pipeline, end the era of mass incarceration, confront institutional racism, and fight to prevent gun violence.

So where do we go from here?

We continue to press forward, changing things once and for all. We stop talking about ensuring nothing like this happens again and actually create and enforce policies that prevent these brutalities.

If we don't, this cycle will continue—and we simply cannot afford that.

Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Campaign Press Release - Where Does South Carolina Go From Here? Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/317024

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