On March 24, 2015 a 10-year-old boy by the name of Marlon Eason was shot in the head and killed In Miami, Florida.

Hours after the story broke that a 10-year-old boy was shot, a local news outlet, WSVN Channel 7 News, tweeted a picture of Marlon.

In the picture, Marlon is wearing what appear to be a white polo, a light grey hoodie and khakis, perhaps a school uniform. In the photo he is looking at the camera, his hands appear to be raised, and they are blurred out. This is the photo that WSVN-TV chose to tweet. When you see a picture that has part of it blurred out, what does it indicate? Something inappropriate; gang signs perhaps? When there is a photo of someone’s raised hand blurred out, what do you automatically assume? That they’re flipping off the camera. So here we have a photo of a child that was shot in the head, this is breaking news, and the photo that we see of him he is presumably flipping the camera off.

Here’s the best part. In the original photo, with no blurring, he’s not flipping anyone off. His hands are just raised in front of him. You can easily find it just by googling Marlon’s name. If you go on the twitter account WSVN-TV you’ll find that the tweet in question has since been deleted.

You might be wondering why this caught my eye, or why I’m even writing about this. It’s not that significant, right? Another black kid in an inner city neighborhood got shot. Basic, right? Considering the fact that young black males are dying at a disproportional rate here in the United States, no it’s not that surprising. You might be asking yourself some questions. If Marlon wasn’t flipping off the camera, why would they blur out his hands? Why would they even tweet that particular picture to begin with?

Here’s the answer. When you criminalize black people, it makes it easier to disregard their lives. It’s about criminalization of character. It’s the same reason that after Trayvon Martin’s death we were bombarded with pictures of him flipping off a camera or wearing a hoodie. It’s the same reason that the image we saw of Martese Johnson, the University of Virginia honors student beaten by police, was his mug shot.

They couldn’t find any incriminating photos of him. When you write black people off as thugs, or troublemakers, it makes their murders that much easier to rationalize and write off. Then you have people who wonder why the #BlackLivesMatter movement needs to exist. It’s small, almost unnoticeable, micro-aggressions like these that tie in everything that I have been writing about for the past semester. We will never truly feel that black lives matter, until these things no longer go unnoticed, and by non-blacks specifically.

Ultimately it’s up to us to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future.

Hawa Henderson is a senior in microbiology. She can be reached at [email protected].