I was born in the middle class. My grandmother an immigrant. My appearance, blonde hair and blue eyes. My skin color, white. At a very young age, I learned a very valuable lesson.
For the rest of my life, I would be White and the people I held closest, Black. I lived on a small island in New England, the epicenter of suburbia. We knew the police in the neighborhood and would always feel comfortable approaching them for a sticker.
As a young child, my mother would take me from my neighborhood, to a neighborhood deemed, “the projects”, to be babysat by her best friend, a black women who I would come to know as my aunt. Her daughter, my cousin, would be with me for life as a part of my family. Her mother, my Nana, may she RIP.
I didn’t realize what our difference in skin color really meant in this world. To me, at that time, I knew these were my people, my family.
Let’s move along to when I became a teenager. I was very attracted to the athletes in the “city” school. I dated a few. They were young and handsome and Black. I can remember, my best friend’s mother at the time, yelling about me dating one of them and that they were “Black as Sin”. In that moment, EVERYTHING would start to become clearer. Those words cut my soul. They changed me. Not to become like her mother, but to always push back against what THAT was.
Next stop, I move to an old southern neighborhood in the sticks of Florida. My high school was heavily divided in groups of color and culture. But I loved black culture. Hip Hop was in its Golden Era, and I was absorbed growing up, 3 hours away from its center. So I chose my friends, and even more importantly, I chose my extra curricular activity. I decided to join what I thought was the best way to spend my remaining high school years, The Step Team. P.U.S.H. (People United Serving Humanity). That is who WE were. I was one of two white girls on the team out of roughly 30. Then one day, during a parade, a teammate was feeling nauseas and asked a local restaurant to use the bathroom. She came out in tears telling us they wouldn’t let her and that their restaurant was for customers only. She was Black, I was White. I knew what needed to be done. So I did it. I went in with my White Skin and asked to use the bathroom, which, they permitted. I went outside, grabbed my teammates hand and took her to the bathroom that was so conveniently available. I was disgusted and NEVER would step foot in that restaurant again.
Let’s fast forward to a night out, with my Black girlfriends at 21 years young. We went to an afterparty for a big HBCU rivalry game, which ended in a small fight between 2 men, to thereafter being escorted out of the building with the crowds of attendees by the SWAT team geared up for war. I can still remember thinking how excessive their force was for something as minor as a bar fight. I remember not being able to walk because of my stiletto heels and having officers tell me to move faster. We hadn’t done ANYTHING but follow the directions.
Now lets move onto another moment. A moment I was driving with an ex at night. He was Black, I was White. I remember seeing the cop lights behind me, thinking, why? I had been driving the speed limit, my car was almost new. Why? When they pulled me over, I did ask why. They told me that there was a rental that was reported stolen and that my car had out of state plates. “Yes officer, I just moved from Florida”. Then, they did something that again, would change me. They went to my passenger, a young black man, and proceeded to ask for his ID. When they took our ID’s back to the car, I looked at him and said, “this isn’t right, why would he need your ID” . He told me, just relax and that these things happen to people that look like, him. It infuriated me to feel the injustice in that moment.
Now, to the moment, that allowed me to see inside of what being profiled by the police felt like. I was living in Las Vegas, promoting night clubs, walking on the strip all day to give out passes to partygoers. One day, and many times after this, I was out talking to different groups of people about the clubs, when a cop tells me to go next to his car. He then proceeded to ask me what I was doing out here. I told him. He said are you sure, your not out here prostituting. I was speechless. I was nauseated by what he was accusing me of. He asked for my ID, but I didn’t have it. He then told me I need to tell him the truth or I’ll be arrested. But I was. He had me standing on the side of Las Vegas Boulevard for almost an hour treating me like a prostitute who was going to be arrested, stripping me of any freedom I thought I had. In that moment, I felt less than human. I felt scared. This moment would repeat many times after that. As long as I chose to stand on the strip and promote, the police chose to profile and harass me.
Being on the strip allowed me to see the true colors of bias the police would have against different groups of people. Let me tell you, that in my two years and hundreds of days, walking the strip, young black men were the most targeted. If you were a black man, in anything less than a suit, in a group of 2 or more, you would be interrogated. Like clock work, I would watch the atrocity and know what that felt like, at least a fraction of it. Like a snapshot in time, I saw what those minutes of interrogation would feel like. I watched as young black men were stripped of their rights just for being Black.
THESE are just a few of the instances that helped me realize my fight is for this to STOP. I will use my White Privilege to always stand on the right side of Justice. These are my family members, my friends, and people I look up to that deal with the unfair treatment on a DAILY BASIS. I’m SO FORTUNATE that I have seen what THIS was from the moment my world was disrupted by RACISM. It is HATE, and it doesn’t belong in the United States of America. Period.
Sereniti Sparkles 