弗格森骚乱 (fu ge sen sao luan): Ferguson riots

Fresh protests have erupted in about a dozen US cities against the decision to not indict white policeman Darren Wilson for fatally shooting 18-year-old African-American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August. Protests against the shooting have been continuing in about 90 cities in 34 states, sporadically in some, since then. Protests of this scale have been rarely seen in the US since the Vietnam War.

A day before the jury's decision to declare Wilson "innocent", a 12-year-old black boy was shot by a police officer for "threatening people with a toy gun" at a playground in Cleveland, Ohio. Senior police officers said the officer fired two shots at the boy after he refused to raise his hands.

In 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teen was shot by George Zimmerman, who was on neighborhood patrol in Sanford, Florida.

These tragedies show that racial discrimination is deeply rooted in some white American people's mind, and it will not change even if they have voted for a black president. As a matter of fact, US President Barack Obama grew up mostly in a white neighborhood and received elite education in the US. So he does not represent the majority of African-Americans who don't have access to the resources or education that white Americans have.

About two-thirds of the residents in the neighborhood where Brown was shot are black. Yet only three of the 53 policemen at the local police station are black. And according to a report of 2013 Pew Research Center research, the chances of an African-American male being jailed is six times more than his white counterpart.

The US for years has been using human rights as an important diplomatic weapon to attack other countries. But its criticism reeks of hypocrisy because it doesn't grant full human rights to all its people. The US needs to indulge in self-reflection instead of advising the rest of the world what is the right thing to do.