Anyone, and I mean ANYONE that knew me in grade-school could tell you that race meant absolutely nothing to me, up until the moment I was beaten up for being white. 4^th grade, and suddenly I was aware of skin color. I never noticed it before, But Lizette Melendez decided she didn’t like me because I was quiet and a good student. So naturally, I must think I’m better than she is because I'm white. And I didn’t fight back because in my mind’s eye, I saw myself grab her head and bang it repeatedly against a wall. I couldn’t do that, so I did nothing. 

I took it to the system. She was suspended and had to apologize, and explain why she did it. She made up a ridiculous story. I was supposed to have dissed her family, or something. Hmpf. While we were fighting, she kept on and on about my skin color. You’d think it would have come up, my supposed insult.

 That’s when I developed that look, the one no one should have before at least 21. The one that conveys your knowledge of the other person’s bullshit, and what, exactly, you think of them and the situation. 

Anyway, for the next 2 decades or so, I walked around, not thinking about race on a personal level. It literally made no difference to me. I have never been politically-correct, so I listened to jokes. Of all kinds. I was like “Family Guy”. An equal-opportunity offender – Jokes about religion, even jokes about women. If no one was sacred, it was all good. I know when the line was stepped over though, from humor to hate. And I stopped listening. Not to Family Guy, but just about everything else. The day-to day stuff people might share with one another…no. If it’s racial, I don’t want to hear it.

Now? I see how truly bad it is. Police behavior at its worst, contributing to the death, if not outright killing black men and women. Not all Law Enforcement Officials are bad, but the bad ones make the headlines that form national opinion. That’s just how it is, folks.

I was driving home over the Tappan Zee the day the Diallo verdict came in and they found the officers not guilty. 41 fucking bullets and no one is guilty?!  I was screaming at the top of my lungs in my car, windows up. I still can’t get over it. I’m old enough to remember the Eleanor Bumpers assassination. Horrible. And let’s not forget the man who was sodomized by some of New York’s finest. How in the hell do you get from bringing in a suspect(?) to raping him with a foreign object? How?

And it’s getting worse. Every few weeks you hear about a new police-associated death. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Don’t they have to pass a psych exam before going in? Maybe they need to make the exam harder, or something. That Blue Wall bullshit needs to go away. You get 2 cops to a car. The odds of them both being bent should be staggering considering the full staff of a precinct. How does this stuff keep happening?

My own contact with Paterson police went like this: Early one Saturday morning, I woke up to doors banging. I remember thinking “Uh-oh. Dad’s in a bad mood. Thank goodness I have work.” So I go downstairs and find a half-naked stranger passed out on the toilet. I woke up everyone and called the police. 20 minutes later, no one had shown up. So my Dad called the police. They showed up and sealed off the block. They come in and decide the dude without pants was drunk, and they’d bring him in to dry out and let him go. One of them decided to go through the pockets and found illicit substances of some sort and then decided to arrest him. One cop turns to me & my brother and asked whose friend he was. They tried to blame me and/or my brother, saying he had to be one of our friends. I found my voice and let the cop know how flawed his thinking was and I walked away. I was 18.