When You See Something, Learn Something

After doing all the “right” things, saying all the right words, living the right way, walking with the right people, eating the right food, and going to the right places, it never occurred to my cousin that he would be arrested in his neighborhood for looking like the “wrong” person.

I was told that murderers lived in the southernmost part of the Bronx. I was under the impression that they lived in dark houses, where the air-conditioning blew hate-winds and death-wishes, and that they hunted down their victims with murder-loving guns. I was made to believe that if a person had a hood on and was wearing earrings and had somewhat of an icy eye and chilly spirit, that was my man! That was my escort to death. That was the guy searching for me to endorse my invisible death certificate. He was the guy the cameras were searching for, the one I had to stay away from.

With rage and contempt, I stared into the face of my cousin Naana. I had been called home to talk some “sense” into his “empty” head after a confrontation with authorities. We both stood there, eyes transfixed, with our breath fanning fury into each other’s face. I could literally feel the pulse of his heartbeat on the skin of my eyes. “The police will kill you!” I said.

After we ran out of energy from being angry with each other, I knew I had lived up to my front-stage role of verbally chastising him but went on to play my backstage role of finding out about the incident. With a hint of sarcasm and humor, I said: “What did you think you were doing, hanging around someone’s cart of groceries?” He silenced me with his side of the story.

He was rushing home from the bus station that cold afternoon to help Mum prepare dinner. He wanted to kill two birds with one stone by catching up with mum and improving his culinary skills. Funny, someone told the poor boy that girls are always impressed by guys who can cook.

Everyone walked by swiftly, getting a taxi or entering a cafe to keep warm. At the door of an apartment before the turn on a block was a sweet old lady pushing a humongous cart toward her door. She was struggling between the groceries that threatened to fall out of the hanging plastic bags and the handle of the door to her apartment. My cousin rushed to help the old lady to get through her door only to hear the sound of a siren a few seconds later. Someone had called the police on him for trying to rob the old woman.

I then questioned why I hadn’t taken time to find the truth about Naana’s experience by myself. As an African, culture demands that younger people must go out of their way to help older people under any circumstances, but Naana didn’t know that wasn’t always expected.

While Naana’s cultural dilemma gave me a lot to reflect on, I wondered why I forgot to ask him for his side of the story before chastising him. I’d never known him to be a thief. Yes, he wore a hood, a jacket, and a magnetic earring—which he always remembered to take off before entering the house, because he knows Mum would kill him if she ever saw him with an earring on.

Sometimes, qualified people in influential positions will not always be right despite their good intentions to protect “us” from the “others.” After Naana’s incident, I analyzed my perception of people around me.

I have decided that my opinion about the friends I made in the Bronx will not be shaped by newsmen who visited the “hood” for juicy tales of incidents without recounting the other sides of the stories, and neither will my impression of my next date be formed by rumors of an unfortunate experience between my roommate and his ex. I am tired of putting others into a box and forcing them to fit, but still asking, “Why are you all the same?” After all, people only become what we make them to be.

I have also decided that video clips and movies about “others” will not dictate or form my only opinion of women from “minority” groups in my community. Music videos don’t portray women who project images that contradict the stereotypes the media has formed. It’s like an economics class that tells you everything about third world countries that have resources but aren’t “smart” enough to use them without telling you about which nations make the policies that regulate the production and trade of those resources.

I don’t believe my friend Tom Pigman, who left his beautiful life behind in Evanston, Chicago and traveled all the way to a village in Accra, Ghana to help foster a community youth program only to exploit the village of its resources. All Americans cannot be labeled as exploitative.

The media and members of our society who control the information we receive have formed our rigid opinion of every member of our world. Eventually, they rely on us to regurgitate the same information back to them as evidence. It’s about time we asked the media to give us balanced information the issues we care about; that’s what we pay them for.

It will help the police do their jobs when you see something and say something, but it will help the unfairly targeted, unjustly accused, blindly stereotyped members of our community when you see and say something because you actually know it. Everyday we falsely accuse, blindly judge, and see through others through the lens of stereotypes. We make life more complicated, discourage others from doing good, and miss out on what could only be a decent attempt at spreading goodwill.