Here’s what Black people have not done to me: Followed me around in stores. Asked to touch my hair, or just stuck their hands in it without so much as a by-your-leave (and while we’re on the subject, keeping our hands to ourselves all around is the simplest and easiest form of respecting healthy boundaries). Told me the apartment was already rented or only consented to rent to me in a food desert where everyone else just happened to look like me, and where the rents were higher than in other neighborhoods and the housing barely habitable. Given me substandard healthcare or denied me healthcare altogether (and just for the record, most of my medical providers in the last four decades or so have been Black and have always given me the most excellent care). Decided not to give me a loan, or a mortgage, no matter how good my credit and earnings history were. Not even given me a call-back on an application for a job that I was perfectly qualified for. Underfunded the public schools that children who look like me go to, and then turned them into a school-to-prison pipeline. Sited industrial plants that spew cancer-causing chemicals, or any other facilities fouling the air, land, and water, right where I live. Given the local police instructions to stop, frisk, and find a reason to fine me so rich people won’t have to pay taxes, or stop me under any pretext and then kill me. Run me out of town under pain of death and stolen everything I worked for to make a better life for myself and my family. Or killed me and stolen everything I worked for, secure in the knowledge they would suffer no consequences. Killed me on the spot anytime they thought I was being insufficiently submissive—and yes, the inability to distinguish between respect and submissiveness is an equal-opportunity confusion, but we can take note here that the slave patrols from which so many modern police forces descend were fully authorized to kill any Black person they deemed insufficiently submissive, right there on the spot, with rarely if ever any consequences to themselves, just like … now. Black people have also not sat around figuring out ways to make it really hard, if not impossible, for me to vote, just to make sure there could be no changes made to any of the above. The list is so long that people have written whole carefully documented books about the crimes and cruelties inflicted in the furtherance of White supremacy, none of which resemble in any way, shape, or form any of the ways any Black person has ever hurt my feelings.
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