Got pulled over because he “saw someone flash their lights at me” and it made him “think something was going on”. After he ran my paperwork and did multiple full walk-arounds of my car, he decided everything was in order and I was free to go. I just wanted to get home from work.
Living in MD got pulled over when I pulled into my landlady’s [100%, rich, suburban] community and questioned what my purpose was there. “I live here” was not an acceptable answer and I ended up needing to call my landlady to talk to the officer and convince them that I really did live there, in her basement inlaw apartment, courtesy of her granddaughter. When he finally let me go he told me he “actually” pulled me over because he “thought [my] headlights were out” but on “second glance” they were just fine. Dunno how you can mistake headlights being on or off.
And I know I’ve told the story of when one of my elderly white neighbors called the police on me for training my dog in a public use field and how even the cop that showed up thought the call was stupid and racist.
My dad got pulled over when I was still in a carseat because they thought it was “suspicious” that a grown man would have such a young child with him on a school day. He was driving me back to school from a doctor’s appointment. They made him get our of the car, lean against it, and searched both him and the car because they “smelled something” while he did his best to keep me calm and tell me that it was going to be okay. I was too young to understand what happened at the time. I just remember he was furious the entire ride back to school, and he was still mad when I got off the bus that afternoon.
It really is just Like This, being black in this country.
Once got pulled over while biking on the sidewalk for not having my lights on. Despite that not being illegal. Turned out the dude just wanted to demonstrate to the little fuck he was training how to stop someone on a bike and write a ticket for them. I was let go afterwards. I also once got the cops called on me while waiting outside my house for the pizza I ordered. Cops told me someone reported “a suspicious individual lurking in the front yard of the property”. This neighborhood was extremely white.
Or the time a group of six or seven cop cars followed me (like literally did a u-turn to pursue me) at night with their lights off while I was biking home. One of them slammed on the breaks in front of the sidewalk path I was crossing the street to get to and I had to go offroad on a walkpath closed for construction to avoid him.
To cops, black people are animals to be trained, toyed with, tortured, and hunted. If you are doing nothing wrong, they’ll make up things to have a reason to fuck with you. If you for whatever reason look suspicious (not hard to do), they will take the worst case interpretation for your actions and find an excuse to take you in. And if you’re actually doing something illegal, no matter how minor, you’re open season.
When I was 12 years old my oldest brother used to drive us to school. It was a nearly all white prep school in the rich part of town and it had all these long winding roads we had to take to get to campus. One cop pulled us over and said a similar vehichle had been stolen. He forced us to get out of the car and frisked both of us pretty aggressively. After finding nothing and running out of bullshit, he let us go. Literally a month later, that SAME COP pulled us over again for the same bullshit and forcibly searched us all over again. He did not recognize us but we recognized him. My brother was really upset, and so was I but I never forgot the small look of panic in his eyes when we were forced out of our car, he’s such a tough guy but I could tell he was so scared. I wanted to say something, anything to help, but no words came. Fuck the police.
Folks have got to understand that they probably aren’t messed up by some Secret Big Trauma that they just can’t remember; but rather by a million tiny microtraumas that they do mostly remember but don’t even register as traumatic because nobody actually understood that these things would cause trauma, much less stack on each other over the years.
Whether you’re carrying one big rock or a big ol’ bucket of sand, it’s going to weigh on you just as much.
This is why psychologists have started taking more of an interest in CPTSD in the last 10-15 years. What most people know as PTSD is a response to a single, intensely traumatic event (or even a series of events). However, CPTSD (chronic post-traumatic stress disorder) is caused by living for years in a situation where your nervous system cannot catch a break. Even if nothing huge ever happened to you, you always had to be on guard for a thousand little things that could and did happen.
After years and years of this, your nervous system gets “stuck” in an activated threat response. It never really lets you rest, and if this started when you were a kid, you may not develop a lot of neural pathways that you should have, because your brain was too focused on keeping you safe to bother with little things like “genuine human connection” and “interpersonal attachment.”
If it wasn’t for that piano music Kingdom Hearts would be a comedy.
Yoko Shimomura is literally braver than any marine
When Nomura hands her the script for KH4 and she’s gotta figure out how to make Mickey dying in Noctis’ arms look anything but ridiculous with only her piano
legitimately from ages like 12-25 i thought everyone was exhausted to the point of suicidal depression and i was just bad at handling it. kids the normal amount of suicidal ideation is NONE and if you don’t physically recover by sleeping you should see a doctor
