Eric Garner – 61chrissterry

‘…………A student-made video explores the diversity, pain, and hope of the black American experience.

Rebecca McCray is a TakePart staff writer covering criminal justice and legal issues. She is based in New York.

Last December, when a grand jury declined to indict white New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choke-hold killing of Eric Garner, many Americans protested in grief. Much of the outrage was attributable to the persistent lack of justice for black men who die at the hands of police.

At the University of Michigan, three graduate students came together after emotional conversations on campus about the deaths of Garner and black teenager Michael Brown and decided to create Walking the Line of Blackness, a video that shares the voices and experiences of 16 students at their school who identify as black or African American.

The video was a collaborative effort that took place over the course of the spring semester, born of questions about how to drive the conversation forward into action, said Maron Alemu, one of the collaborators and a student at Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

“We can have a conversation out of pain and anger. But how do we–as policy students–channel that into something that doesn’t just start and stop a conversation–but actually inspires others to begin deconstructing how race plays into all of our lives?” Alemu asked.

Alemu, who is black, worked with Pete Haviland-Eduah, who is also black, and Jimmy Schneidewind, who is white, to film student interviews. Each student was asked why it’s important to use the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter instead of #AllLivesMatter.

The video opens with Haviland-Eduah sharing his experience of being stopped by police on campus–because, he says he was told, he “fit the description” of an African American man the officers were looking for; his white friends walked on. The video moves onto a series of stories about the pain of being singled out because of race—in the street, in the classroom, and elsewhere. The video’s emphasis on what should be done to create a national environment in which black lives are treated like they do matter.

“I was surprised by the sheer number of folks who had similar experiences to my own,” Haviland-Eduah told TakePart. “Just hearing about it was almost refreshing, because I felt like I wasn’t alone on an island; I wasn’t the only person this happened to.”