Two weeks after the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, an article by The New York Times, “Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks Grappling With Problems and Promise,” characterized Brown as “no angel.”

Although Alison Mitchell, the publication’s national editor, defended the article as a “nuanced story about the young man,” the social media universe exploded, with the hashtag #noangel quickly accumulating thousands of mentions. Outrage ensued also from the media’s portrayal of Brown through photos, one of which was seized by several blogs proclaiming that Brown’s flashing of a “gang sign” reveals he was a “thug.”

Unfortunately, his story is no anomaly. Brown was one of at least four unarmed black men to die at the hands of police officers in August alone. In a 2002 study published from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Chicago, participants played a game in which they pressed “shoot” in a video simulation if they thought a suspect was holding a gun. Psychologists have found students are more likely to shoot an unarmed black person than an unarmed white person.

The problem doesn’t even end with a tendency by police officers to err on the side of shooting unarmed black men. A The Huffington Post article “When the Media Treats White Suspects and Killers Better than Black Victims” highlights our disturbing tendency to “put the victim on trial”: A contrast exists between the headlines “Ala. suspect brilliant, but social misfit” describing a former professor who murdered three colleagues in 2010 and “Montgomery’s latest homicide victim had history of narcotics abuse, tangles with the law” reporting the shooting of a 25-year-old black man this year. The Staten Island Advance notes the brilliance of Eric Bellucci, a mentally ill man who allegedly killed his parents, while NBC News mentions Trayvon Martin’s disciplinary issues. This is the trend from which anger erupts at Brown’s depiction primarily as “no angel”; it seems some view deviation from perfection in minorities’ behavior as an excuse for officers to act as juries, judges and executioners.

What impact does this have on CHS students, as we are neither police officers nor reporters for media with a nationwide audience? A trend of police shootings of young, unarmed black men and their subsequent portrayals in the media serve as a reflection, rather than a cause, of the societal perception of minorities even today.

The racial makeup of Carmel is 85.4 percent white, with only 3.0 percent African American. The median household income in 2010 was $101,494, almost twice the 2012 national average. It’s easy to see how this school’s students can become contented with a mostly white, middle-class existence. But as Farrah Gray, American businessman and motivational speaker, said, “Comfort is the enemy of achievement.”

A few weeks after Brown’s death, I attended Broadway United Methodist Church in downtown Indianapolis. It was a change both from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where I usually attend, and from Carmel. The sidewalks and buildings on the drive there were not the well-maintained ones I’ve become accustomed to in this affluent community; the congregation consisted of all ages and ethnicities, both of those well-off on the socioeconomic spectrum to those living below the poverty line. What struck me most was a testimony from a black member of the church of an encounter with the police in his youth that left him with 21 stitches. His days of being bitter, he claimed, were over. In light of the shooting in Ferguson and the aftermath, including a flare-up of racial tensions nationwide, he invited everybody to the church parking lot that Saturday for a kickball game in which everybody, regardless of background, would be welcome to play. “It’s a kickball game for peace,” he said.

We have the option to settle for viewing the world through our current lens of idyllic suburbia, through a perspective that maintains a relative lack of diversity as the norm and regards the world outside city confines as a distant one. In doing so, however, we deprive not only ourselves of the opportunity to experience a world that has more to offer than what is here, but also society of wiser, more cultured members who can succeed in eradicating perceptions best left in the past.