Heather and I spent some time at the Apex Pride Festival this weekend. We were volunteering and spent some of our time covering for booth owners while they took a break, got food, whatever. One booth we filled in at had a bunch of cute animal stickers. But they also had one batch of more somber stickers. I saw this one and grabbed me by the heart-strings:
As Black parents, they have to live in fear every time their sons leave the house to go to school, hang out with friends, or go to their jobs. This is a fear that I generally don’t have to have as a white parent.
As white people many of us pretend that racism is a thing of the past or say things like, “Well, if they would just comply with the police…” I used to fall into that trap as well because on the surface it seems logical. But the truth is, Black men in particular are treated differently. They are followed in department stores because store personnel view them as a higher shoplifting threat than others. They get pulled over by police for “reasons” that their white counterparts would not be. And worse, how many times do we see Black teens or Black men on their stomach on the ground, cuffed behind their backs, in what would seem like a routine traffic stop? Police have it ingrained in them that black men pose more of a threat than the rest of the population, or so it seems.
We saw the new “Top Gun: Maverick” movie a couple of weeks ago right here in Apex. Out of nowhere, some punk yelled, “Ni**ar!” in the theater when there was a Black actor on the screen. In 2022. In what “Money Magazine” named the #1 Place to Live in America in 2015. Tell that to the Black citizens of Apex. So while we may feel good about our personal ambition to not be racist, remember that racism is real, we must continually work to root it out and end it, and it comes with very severe consequences in this country.