I was walking with my friend on a summer evening during sunset, headed back to his house after playing at the neighborhood’s tennis courts with a few others. We walked past a small house party, thinking it would most likely soon be shut down in such a quiet neighborhood.
A police car approached us almost a minute later and we assumed they must have been looking for the party. “We received a noise complaint and need to see your IDs,” the officer said to us, with the music from the party still in earshot. Did he think we were walking away from the party? Did he know that there was even a party going on? Why did he need to see our identification? After running our names through the system, he was on his way without even checking around for an actual disturbance. I guess I don’t have to tell you the color of our skin for you to understand how our leisurely stroll was turned into a speed walk so that we could just get back to the house so nobody else could think we were trouble and so that we could process what just happened.
No, my experience with this bizarre profiling didn’t end violently like Alton Sterling or Sandra Bland, but its occurrence was enough to change my perception of race in our society immediately. Whether someone actually reported us for looking suspicious while walking because we were two brown kids in a predominantly white neighborhood, or if the police officer just felt that we could have been up to no good, the only thing that made us different in that neighborhood was the color of our skin—not our clothes (not that it should matter) and not our behavior.
One year prior to this experience, I was called a n***** by a girl at school and she continued to badger me online. My mom didn’t even get a call back from my school. I’ve tried my entire life to stop seeing color, but it’s so hard to do so when everyone else sees yours.
Recently and throughout our nation’s history, when an oppressed people try to speak up about injustices against them, they are shut down and told that they are embellishing or sometimes the injustices are justified based on a record, how someone speaks, and statistics about a race. It’s simply dehumanizing to ignore an entire people when they try to explain the hurt that they feel and how it affects their places in this world. If there were nothing to speak up about, there wouldn’t be movements like “Black Lives Matter.” The end goal is to not have to even address these issues. However, the only way to get there is to have discourse and take action now.
It’s time to listen. Just because someone experiences something that you have not, does not mean that it’s not real. Perception is based on experiences and it would be impossible for all of us to view the world in the same way because we all lead completely different lives and experience different emotions and interactions. We have to stop discrediting the accounts of others just because we cannot relate.
My perspective is based upon my experiences in my life, and the same for anyone else. When we start trying to widen our individual perspectives by receiving those of others who differ from our own, empathy and unison will replace the hate and ignorance we face today.
All lives matter, but right now let’s focus on the ones whose voices haven’t been heard as clearly as the others.
