racism

When you dig deep, you’ll find that both vic­tim and per­pe­tra­tor were fight­ing silent bat­tles   When I was 22, I spent a night in jail for cred­it card fraud. I was a moth­er to six-month-old twins, unwed, and an under­grad in col­lege. My for­mer part­ner and the father of my chil­dren had not paid child sup­port in months and I was strug­gling finan­cial­ly. So when I was issued a cred­it card under his name and pur­chased $300 worth of dia­pers, cloth­ing, and oth­er neces­si­ties for the babies, I was doing what I thought nec­es­sary for our sur­vival.  While the arrest­ing offi­cers were kind to me, I was met with swift dis­dain by the offi­cers at the jail. The sug­ges­tion of my crime gar­nered the dis­missal of my human­i­ty. No one looked me in the eye and I remem­ber being left in a cell for hours after I request­ed a tam­pon because my peri­od had start­ed. In a moment of frus­tra­tion, when I raised my voice in defense, the cor­rec­tion­al offi­cer retreat­ed and drew a weapon. In this time and place, I was a shell of a woman that didn’t have a face. Read more…