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Describe a time you were discriminated against or observed someone being discriminated against. How did you handle it?
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I don't often experience discrimination or at least I don't notice it, except for the times that are painfully apparent. In college, I would often drop my exgirlfriend off on the other side of town late at night. When driving home I notice a parked police car and made eyes with the officer in the car. After our brief interaction, I drove by him and he pulled me over. He asked me for my license, registration and insurance. With everything being squeaky clean he let me go without incident.
My next interaction with police would be almost a decade later. I am living in Maryland at the time, I just finished working out and heading home. As I am driving, I am listening to my rap music loudly and again pass by a police car one block away from my home, the police car activates its lights. Two police officers exit the vehicle, police officer 1, ask for license, registration, and insurance. Officer 2 stood on my right hand side looking from behind shining his light into my face also looking into the back seat. I proceed to ask police officer 1 "why he pulled me over," he replies, "you have an object hanging from your mirror and it impeding your view." Again all my paperwork was legit and they let me go.
The next day I became fixated with the idea that I was pulled over due to a lanyard hanging from the mirror of my vehicle, so much so, I began counting how many people had objects hanging from their mirrors. Guess how many I stopped at? I stopped at 50 cars, before the fixation would cause me to crash.
Due to discrimination's pervasive but subtle nature, often times outside the painfully apparent experiences, the burden of proof is often on the victim. I often take these experiences in stride and try my best to keep myself buttoned up so as to minimize the attrition between myself and an individual who may be governed by faulty views, especially ones in positions of power. These experiences spawn from both systematic and social factors that are also subtly injected into the institutions that are suppose to be fair and create equitable conditions.
With that being said, these racial profiling experiences I've experienced are not just my own but a shared one. This idea compelled me to begin authoring a book that would educate people of the subtleties of discrimination and racism implicating the institution as the biggest offender. My hopes that by authoring my book my audience draws four outcomes; enlightenment for those within my culture and outside, of the deeper implications of the social inequities that plague minority communities; give tools to recognize tenuous behaviors; as well as coping mechanisms to deal when faced with discriminatory conditions and to preclude any future misfortunes when interacting with authority figures.
Never Forget their names
Breonna Taylor
Tamir Rice
Freddie Gray
Sandra Bland
Michael Brown
George Floyd
REST IN POWER!
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