I’m a second-year teacher, and I was sitting in my classroom Monday, waiting for my new students to come in after the first tardy bell. As I heard the sounds of their footsteps echoing down the halls, I went to my computer to shut down my Internet windows. On the screen was the face of Michael Brown, the teenager killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, two weeks ago, and I couldn’t help but see his face mirrored in those of my students who were clambering through my door.

Brown’s death was a tragedy, and I feel regardless of whatever circumstances led to the first shot (whether Michael Brown was attacking the officer, or, as Brown’s family claims, it was accidental contact that led to police brutality), the subsequent fatal shots to Brown were only fired because of a deeply held fear in this country of violent African-American males.

I’m not saying the officer was a racist by any means, but rather, we as a country both actively and indirectly perceive African-American males to be violent criminals, and young men are dying because of it.

We live in an incredibly scary time. This country is too divided. We’ve pushed ourselves farther and farther to the extremes, as fear-mongering politicians have been raiding the centrists for decades, sowing discord in the place of unity. This needs to stop, but where is the end? For so long, we’ve sat on the laurels of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks as their accomplishments withered with time.

There are no civil rights leaders anymore for this generation. The Revs. Al Sharpton and the Jesse Jackson are too commercialized and out of touch with this generation to be anything more than a mouthpiece for someone else’s agenda of lukewarm change. Students and young minds have been the voices of change for the past 230 years, and the nation needs young men and women leading a new movement.

Hate, oppression, ignorance, prejudice and discrimination are all heads of the same hydra, sprouting up constantly from fear. Fears of the other, fears of difference and fears of “un-Americanness” have ruled this country for too long. Lynn Sacco, Ph.D, once told me that the brilliance in Karl Rove was that he made elections about issues that only the far ends of the political spectrum would want to vote on, and fear is his (and those that follow his plans) weapon. Fear is the only weapon of mass destruction that we’ve found since 9/11.

Our country is filled to the max with fascists wearing the skins of dead elephants. While young men and women will take to the streets to protest Brown’s death, ultimately, nothing will get done since protests like these peter out as our 24/7 news cycle jumps to another war, another plane crash or another headline.

Cornel West wrote in “Race Matters” that the difference between today and the Civil Rights era of the ’60s is today we lack cross-national “genuine humility” and “authentic anger.” We need to be angry, we need to have a sense of interconnectedness, but instead, we let a social construct like race bar us from making significant changes in the world. Ferguson is a reminder that there is still passion in the world, and anger and outrage; we just need to harness it.

I wrote this letter because I looked at my students and grew hopeful. With them in my heart, and the thought of students on this campus as well, I think change may come, but not easily. It’ll require us, as Americans, to sit down, cut the crap and talk honestly and openly about how we’ve run ourselves into the arms of anti-intellectualism, anti-equality and anti-progressivism. That’s the conversation we need to have as a campus, and a country, so there are no more Michael Browns in anyone’s classrooms.