Originally found at Harvard Business Review.
On March 23, 2012, then-President Barack Obama made a statement about the killing of an unarmed, 17-year-old Black teenager, Travyon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin,” he said. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.” Tim Cook, the openly gay CEO of Apple, shed tears during a moment of silence at a developer conference in 2016 to honor the 49 victims of a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In 2019, Latinx individuals in the U.S. described feeling “hunted” after 22 people, almost all of whom were immigrants of Latinx descent, were killed in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
This experience was curious because these events did not directly happen to us or within our own immediate communities. However, they remained at the forefront of our minds for hours and sometimes days after the events, even altering how we navigated our day-to-day lives. This lingering feeling led us to ask, “Why?”
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