“It’s a Bird” 

By: Christian Cooper 

When someone decides to go bird watching, they go out expecting to see a bunch of new and interesting birds, what they don’t expect is to be threatened to be arrested. Especially if they aren’t doing anything that’s against the law. In the artwork “It’s a Bird” by Christian Cooper that is exactly what happens. In the picture is shows a young person of color being yelled at by a white woman. She’s yelling about how she’s being threatened and that she will call the police. The person of color ends up turning around and blocking out what she is saying as he realizes that he’s better than that and he doesn’t need to encourage her anger when he’s done absolutely nothing wrong. Her voice starts off super big and loud but as the comic goes on and the boy decides he’s had enough, her words become super small and almost nonexistent. The thing about this comic is, is the fact that this situation of a person of color being harassed by a white person isn’t a rare occasion at all. And the fact that this happens so often and not only by citizens on the street but by people of power shows that us, as a society, need to do a lot of work to fix this. Being disrespectful to and excluding people who are not only innocent, but a part of humanity too is so horrible and it’s hard to understand how someone can be so closeminded about something that they honestly shouldn’t even be allowed to have an opinion on so therefore we shouldn’t treat them any differently. Yet it still happens to so many people every day and the comic shows a perfect example of that in the way that at the beginning of it, it shows the boy surrounded by a bunch of people of color that are important in history and who have all experienced these acts of racism firsthand and it’s almost like he is getting the strength and encouragement from these people to be the bigger person and turn away. It’s like their all standing together to show him that he is strong and that they’ll get through this with the support of each other. An example of some of those people in the comic are George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Both of their stories were everywhere a little while back because people were furious about what happened to them. Two innocent people of color who were killed by police officers. Even though their stories made a bunch of people really open their eyes and realize that it was that bad and it always has been, it still hasn’t been enough which is really upsetting because this still happens to people of color in their day to day lives. Hopefully they can open their eyes wider and see what people of color go through every day of their lives and how 99.9% of them don’t feel safe even just going out for a walk because they’re afraid of being seen as a threat and being attacked for not a single reason at all. This is, of course, not fair at all and every human being, regardless of their skin color deserves to be treated with respect and the fact that people have been fighting for this for so long shows how humans, as a whole, must continue to fight to put an end to racism and disrespect to people of color and hopefully one day we can.