Column: It's always been personal

“Do you live here?” exclaimed the police officer who had pulled into our driveway and interrupted my and my brother’s basketball game. A few minutes earlier, I had climbed onto the trash bin to fix the insect screen that had fallen off the nearest window. The sight of a 12-year-old brown boy atop a trash bin in a white neighborhood must have raised the suspicion of the neighbors.

The officer was shielding himself from behind his car door, and his hand was hovering over his holster. He continued to question us: What were you doing? Why were you on top of the trash can? Why were you fixing the insect screen? Do you really live here?

We were overcome with a sense of fear and numbness as we proceeded to answer his questions. We felt unsafe. In our own driveway.

Years later, and I still wonder whether our neighbors would have called the police if I were a white boy atop a trash bin.

I wonder whether the police officer would have felt threatened by our presence had our skin been white, not brown. I wonder whether the officer would have pulled the trigger had our skin been Black, not brown.

I grew up navigating a world of black and white as a brown boy in post-9/11, rural America.

From an early age, I learned that the mantra of life, liberty and happiness was a false hope, one that failed to encapsulate the politics of my melanin.

“Don’t talk to the neighbors,” warned my father. “They think we are terrorists.”

“You can’t come up here,” taunted my white schoolmates from atop the playground structure. “Your skin is brown.”

To be Black and brown in America is to be racialized as pathological and criminal. To be phenotypically Muslim is to be a terrorist. To be Indigenous and Latino is to be illegal and alien. To be Black is to be policed and surveilled. To be a melanin being in America is to experience the traumas of being.

Melancholia saturates the memories of my childhood — an abstruse and abiding sorrow arising from the oppression of my spirit.

I placed my faith in my parents’ words that education and career success would grant me the life, liberty and happiness I desperately craved. I will be graduating from UNC in a few weeks, yet I am not liberated from the injustices that define my existence.

For years, I could not contextualize my experiences as a brown boy in America beyond the emotional and psychological wounds that they inflicted.

I wrote this column to expose these wounds. I wrote to voice the melancholy that blinds me. I wrote to stitch my oppression and that of other Black and brown folk to the expanses of white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism. I wrote to demand justice over peace.

I wrote to heal.