Welcome to the Tweed Trends podcast. Hey, Evette, what's trending today? Hey, I'm Evette, hey, girl. And you are tuned in to Tweed Trends.
It's the quickest way to find out what's trending today. Today is International Day of the African Child, also known as Youth Day. Let's get started. Not even 45 years ago, this was in the 70s, 1976.
Nearly 10,000 black students from Soweto, South Africa marched the streets to protest the poor quality of their education. They marched as a way to demonstrate their disapproval of the Black Education Act, which segregated students based on their race, and also required them to learn in a different language other than their native tongue. Now, from the accounts that I was able to look up, it said that this all happened on a day where these students were going into their final exams. And many were concerned that if the teachers required them to respond to the exam questions in the African's language, that they would not be able to answer the questions adequately because they did not know the language.
How is it someone can ask you to do a test and you don't even know the language that the test is going to be in? How crazy is that? How is that fair? But I look at that as it parallels the situation with education here in the States and all of the standardized testing that we do, where there's clearly been fingers pointed at the fact that there is bias in standardized testing.
But for some reason, it's OK. You sit there, you fight it, you fight it, you fight it. And there's always some other way around that the people who don't want it to be fair. And I don't understand what is there for us to lose in having fair standards in testing.
I don't get that. That makes no sense to me. But I digress back to this particular day in history. So the day of the African child has been celebrated on June 16th to commemorate those that were killed during the Soweto Uprising in South Africa.
Those police officers actually came out and shot into the crowd of these peaceful protests that the African children were having in regards to their education. Depending on who you get the information from, we'll determine what this whole story sounds like. There's the spin that the South African press put on it, that it was just out of control from the start. There's the accounts from the people that were there that were like, no, this was a peaceful event until the police started to cause issues.
Basically, they're saying that it was one of the police officers that threw tear gas into the crowd. And that was pretty much the start of the end, where eventually one of the police officers pulled out his gun and began shooting into the crowd of children that were out there protesting. From that point, things just got really chaotic, because then looting did take place. However, they say that from the people who were there that were a part of the protests, they tried to explain that the looting was not random.
They just weren't running through burning places and breaking into places. It was mainly places like the beer halls that most of them had been built by the municipality. And as they looted these places, they were shouting less liquor, better education, where basically they looked at it from the standpoint of the government came and put these bottle stores, these beer halls, into their communities intentionally to try to make the black people become more apathetic. And they were wanting better for themselves.
And so it just made for a really bad situation. It went from being peaceful to an uncontrollable situation that started in one location and spread throughout the entire country. So, I mean, does it sound familiar? This is a terrible cycle that we have going on around the world.
We can't even just say that it's in the United States because it's happening everywhere. But for us, for black people in particular, to say that here we are in this day and time, 30 years ago, we had the Rodney King beatings. 30 years before that were the civil rights marches where the peaceful protests were attacked, the protesters were attacked by dog, by water hoses, by police officers with weapons. And so going back to the Rodney King situation, because I was actually around for that, I said and I tried to think, what was it that took place that caused all of the writing and the protesting to stop?
What stopped it? And I think it was just more along the lines of they put these curfews in place and people settled down and they eventually just kind of got lulled back into a little sleep there. And people went back to what they were doing beforehand. And I hate that it had to take another person's life for it to get to this point because it's not like it's just been one since Rodney King.
It has been multiples, multiples. And yet there are still some people out there that cannot cope with the reality of what they're seeing on all of these video footages that have been taken. They can't seem to grasp that concept that bad stuff is happening out there. They'd rather try to figure out, well, how was this person bad?
Because they had to have done something to deserve this. And I beg to differ, you cannot take a simple situation today and then a reaction where the person gets killed because of that simple situation and then go back months or years. It'd be like, oh, oh, but if you look, they had a record, they had a this, they had a that, they had nothing to do with what that person did in that moment when that person took their life. They made it so that there's no way that person could atone for any of that stuff.
It's over, it's no do-overs, this isn't a video game. But so I look at this situation now and everybody is fired up, they're gung-ho, they're coming up with solutions to problems and people are, I guess, calling themselves sitting down together talking, trying to work things out. But the problem that I see is that until we can get everyone to come to the table, it's always gonna be a problem. I'm always gonna have to watch my back because there's gonna be that person that still does not believe.
They're like, I'm better than you. You don't deserve this stuff. So I can work super hard for everything that I get and because someone else out there sees that I have and they don't and they think that it's not fair that I have, they can do their best to take it away from me, whether they're gonna take that thing or they're gonna take my life, but they're gonna take something. And once it's done, it's done.
And then the system has to fix it at that point. Are they gonna stand up for me and give justice? Or is it gonna just kinda fall by the wayside like things have over the years and it's gonna take some other situation further down the line to spark it up again and get everybody hot and mad and wanting to see a change? So I just hope and pray and wish that if you guys are out there doing great things, trying to make changes, don't get weary and well doing.
Hang in there, stick with it. We gotta make it stick this time. Okay, so my apologies. I completely hijacked the International Day of the African Child Observance to talk about what's happening here in the United States, but I just had that on my heart and I had to get it off.
So thank you for sticking with me. Thank you for hanging in there. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And so to get back to that observation of the International Day of the African Child, to celebrate it, why not consider making a donation to the Kind Project, that's K-I-N-D project, or schools are already out in most places because I would say volunteer at a school, but because of the whole COVID-19 situation, kids weren't in school anyway.
So because of that difference of time, like some schools started back, stopped going back in March. So why not reach out to a friend of the family or a relative that has kids and do something educational with them, whether it's over the phone, by video messaging or something, just to kind of promote a little bit of education, considering that they missed out on a good bit of their formal education in the classroom. And then last but not least, you can always learn a little bit more about the issues, those issues facing people in Africa, in regards to education, or you can even check out the situations in your home front where you are right now. There's stuff going on everywhere, believe me.
So there's no lack of issues for you to check on. Speaking of checking on stuff, how about check on me, on Instagram and Twitter, at HEVETE, or just look for the hashtag tweet trends. Thank you so much for hanging in there with me, and I'll be back here again on Thursday.