Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first youth poet laureate, said she was”tailed” and told”you seem suspicious” by a security guard because she walked home Friday night.
“A security guard tailed me in my walk home tonight. He wanted if I lived there because’you seem suspicious.’ I revealed my keys & buzzed myself in my building.
“This is the reality of black women: One day you’re known as a star, the following day, a hazard,” she added.
At a later tweet, the 22-year-old stated,”In a way he was right. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal threat to the forces that be. A threat and proud.”
America’s youngest inaugural poet earned national acclaim on January 21 when she recited her poem,”The Hill We Climb,” as President Joe Biden took the oath of office.
It was mere days since a mob of armed forces Trump fans wielding bombs, knives, and pepper spray stormed the Capitol.
The experience with the safety guard Gorman clarifies is reminiscent of police aggression and violence against Black Americans, whose deaths have sparked nationwide movements, including #BlackLivesMatter.
Black guys are roughly 2.5 times more likely to die in the hands of police over a life as compared to White men, based on research by the National Academy of Sciences.
According to the 2019 study, Black women are roughly 1.4 times more likely to be killed by authorities compared with White women, according to the researchers.
In March 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was captured and killed by police officers inside her flat in Louisville, Kentucky during a flawed forced entry raid.
Her death sparked a national rallying cry for racial justice and an overhaul of this policing system, for example, campaign #SayHerName.
“#SayHerName is grounded in the sad reality that Black women and women who are targeted, brutalized, and killed by police are frequently excluded from mainstream narratives around police violence,” the effort’s webpage reads.
“You’re not safe anywhere. Not even safe in your own home,” #SayHerName founder and attorney Kimberlé Crenshaw told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
