I havent told this story. I havent had occasion to tell it. A few months ago I was driving home on the Lexington Road. I came upon an SUV stopped in the right lane. No flashers. I stopped behind it and put on my flashers. Then I called 911 to get an officer out to prevent an accident. A young woman burst from the passenger side of the front of the SUV — an African-American woman. She angrily asked me who I was calling. I explained. She was very upset that I had involved the police. The driver was an older African-American woman. She told me they were out of gas. The cruiser pulled up. I explained the situation and said I would go to the station on the corner and get some gas. I did. When I returned, they had managed to move the SUV off the road. We put the gas in. I asked whether that was enough to get them home. The older woman looked doubtful, but said she had no money to buy gas. So I followed them to the station and put in $30 worth. One of the womans friends then drove up and offered to reimburse me. Just pay it forward, I said. It turns out the older woman and her friend were teachers. The young woman apologized to me and said she reacted as she did because of her distrust of the police. Every single one of my encounters with the ACC police have left me either impressed or at least satisfied, except for those two tickets Ive always thought gratuitous. An officer who had worked with Ian in the troubled months before his death stood at attention by his casket, unbidden, for the entire time of the viewing with a crowd that went all the way around the funeral home. It hurts my heart that a young black woman would distrust law enforcement so. The decent white folks who dont get Ferguson yet, some of them maybe, will allow themselves over these next months to open themselves to the possibility that the world as they experience it is not the world as it is, but an insulated world, full of its own challenges to be sure, but lacking the peculiar and hard realities our minorities face.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:09:17 +0000
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