"It’s the same tone that the officer has when she tells you your neighborhood is blocked for residents only as you and your friends drive home from a Mardi Gras parade, when you have a residents tag on your car. You’ve been in the car line for 10 minutes and watched them let every one else pass without stopping them at all.
It usually does not include “please.” It does not include “will you.” It does not include “would you mind,” for you must not even be worth wasting their mouths forming these respectable words. Although, you usually see them used seconds before or after you.
You don’t feel that most of the people in these incidents do not like black people, but simply are a product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought.
Many times the tone just simply says, “I do not feel you belong here...
You’re full of passion and shock, so you share this story on Twitter, hands shaking, because you actually want these women to face accountability in some kind of way. You know that you cannot speak to them with out it escalating because they have no respect for you or your son, and this will only end badly for you and feel it’s not worth getting the police involved. So, you are hoping they will hear you this way...
You realize that you never called these women racists, but people will continuously put those words in your mouth.
What you did indeed say is, “This is why many black people are uncomfortable being in predominately white spaces,”and you still stand true to that."
There is also a Look. I spend a lot of my days with the perpetual feeling that there is something gross stuck to me or a giant revealing hole in my clothes because of that Look.
Most people don't seem to realize when they are giving the Look.
FB: "Solange Knowles' important essay on being a black person in spaces that white people implicitly think of as their own, and the exhaustion of having to constantly reaffirm that you belong (a safe space is a space where you have no fear that people would throw limes at you)"
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