Every morning I wake up and leave the house wondering if today’s going to be the day cops will get called on me because I’m black and my presence makes some white person uncomfortable. If I’d said that a few months ago, you might’ve had a reasonable case of charging me with engaging in hyperbolic BS, but not any more.
Just in the past couple of months here in Amerikkka we’ve had these instances of white people calling the police on black people for essentially being in their space:
- Waiting for a friend while black at Starbucks in Philly.
- Golfing while black in York County, Pennsylvania.
- Walking home from work while black in Asheville, N.C.
- And most recently, napping in a common room while black at Yale University.
These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg. Black people all over America, and probably the world, suffer similar indignities on a daily basis and just suck it up and carry on because we’ve come to expect it and really just want to live in peace. And no, it doesn’t always involve having the cops called on us, it’s typically more subtle and less publicized...but it’s real and has been real pretty much since we got off the boat in 1619.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s the color of our skin, the texture of our hair, the broadness of our noses, the thickness of our lips, the muscularity of our butts...I don’t know, but people seem to be uncomfortable with blackness and it’s their problem, not ours! But of course, we suffer the consquences of their racism.
This is nothing new. But it’s way past time for it to stop. Makes me angry. Makes me sad. Makes me want to holler.
So, as I go about my business today I also have to be concerned that somebody might decide I’m suspicious enough to call the police on me. And then like Lolade Siyonbola, a graduate student at at Yale University, I’ll have to suffer the indignity of proving I’m not a criminal and that I’m “supposed” to be wherever I’m being detained and questioned by police officers who seem more interested in finding a reason to lock me up than going after the fool who called them for nothing.
Tell me the difference between that and blacks having to show “papers” in the American south when slaves were required to carry a written pass from their owners whenever they went off the plantation or “passbooks” that blacks in South Africa had to carry everywhere they went back in the days of Apartheid.
Here it is 2018 and I’m feeling like black people still have to deal with the indignity of the demand of being confronted with: “Papers please!” I don’t have a passbook and I’m not planning on getting one. Makes me want to holler.