This morning sitting in my office I started hearing yelling and screaming outside. I looked out the window and saw two young Black girls screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. Normally, I would have just ignored it but after 20 minutes they hadn’t stopped, and it had gotten louder. Now there was two more girls and two young men out there in front of the house. I was standing at the window when I saw my next-door neighbor, also a young Black girl headed toward the commotion. To be honest, I went through the typical range of emotions including embarrassment, annoyance, and aggravation of/for our people.
Today something else happened, I felt the need to help these young sisters. Once outside it was still getting progressively louder, one of the young ladies in a frenzy kept yelling, “I need that!” I learned in one of the few lucid moments what that meant, smacking the back of one hand into the palm of the other she told me, “I need that ass right here!” I had stepped into pure chaos with a need to stop it, not for me but for them, my young Black sisters, to help, to elevate these Black women above the current space they were in. Stepping in the middle of the madness trying to bring the temperature down, I needed them to be safe. I was scared for them. I begged the two who didn’t live here to get out of the street, get in their car and go before the police came and pleaded when the sirens got closer. Too late, four squads pulled up scattered haphazardly in the street. I was in the middle of the street desperately trying to get the loudest one to calm down, it wasn’t working.
My neighbor now caught up in the madness, barefoot in the street in November, was yelling about fighting too. I looked her in the eyes and said go home now! After several times she went.
What infuriated me most of all was when I heard the first words out of a white male officers’ mouth, “Stop or I’m going to taze you!”, he repeated it several times. I yelled back DO NOT TAZE HER! Which could have gotten me tazed.
We need to be safe; we need to protect our Black girls and women; we need to protect ourselves. We know it’s going to get worse.
