I’m writing today in response to a Letter to the Editor published on September 1 entitled “In Ferguson, we are all ignorant to the facts.”

To the author, you attribute your silence on Ferguson to a lack of knowledge while admitting that this is an issue that affects your life, but if you really feel that way, you should seek knowledge instead of writing to the Daily Eastern News expressing your willful ignorance.

You say “I am not Officer Darren Wilson, and I am not Mike Brown — the only two people who know what truly happened that night.” 

Perusing CNN will tell you that Wilson shot Brown in broad daylight. 

You need to grasp the blatant devaluation of black male life in the United States. 

Had you attended the Delta Sigma Theta rally and discussion on August 27th, promoted in the News, you would have heard the facts and how Ferguson affects our peers. 

You would have heard how frustrating it is that people continue to bring up the looting, valuing property over black life.

As a white, female, middle class person, you have grown up in an environment where the death of a black man by the hands of police is something that you can simply say “I have no opinion on it.”

Your lack of opinion is saddening to say the least, but your defense of this neutrality is terrifying. If this is the caliber of care we get from our student government, then I am not EIU.

-Jason Haarmann,

Senior Mathematics Major