This came across my newsfeed this morning, and it involves a somewhat-local yogurt shop calling the police on a black man in their store where he was not wanted:
The gist is that Byron Ragland, a court-appointed special advocate and visitation supervisor, was overseeing an outing between a mother and her son. The family wanted to get yogurt, so Ragland drove them to a nearby shop. For whatever reason, Ragland didn’t buy any yogurt, but the family did, and under his supervision the mother and son…visited.
Two employees were nervous about Ragland being there, and they got the store owner involved. The cops were called on this man, “African American” in the owner’s words, and the two cops showed up to roust Ragland and eject him.
Ragland complied, as did the family, and that was that. However, news got out about this, and Ragland’s situation was published in the Seattle Times.
This is a perpetual story in America, that black people don’t belong here. Don’t belong in restaurants, don’t belong in dance clubs, don’t belong in classrooms, don’t belong in church, don’t belong in politics, don’t belong in jobs. The safest short-term response of black people in America is to attempt to be invisible, to live and die unnoticed, to be “good black people” and to let white people carry out their own lives untroubled by the affairs of black people.
It’s completely wrong and completely unjust. It’s wrong to expect black Americans to stay silent, to be invisible, to leave where they’re not wanted. We are wrong when we think this, and we are wrong when we expect this. We are wrong when we simply “ask” black people to leave, or when we wish black people could go back to being quiet when we’re speaking.
I wish this didn’t happen, day after day, in America. But it does, and will continue to happen, until white people break this curse of racism.
I don’t know when that will happen.