Traveling While Black
By MADISON E. JOHNSON
14 hours ago
... I listen to John Denver, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. I pee in endless roadside gas stations. I eat at Cracker Barrel. And in this way it’s mine. All of this Southern Americana. It’s mine because I say it is, and because damned if I haven’t seen my fair share of sunsets from Southern rest areas, damned if I don’t know every word to “Take me Home, Country Roads.”
On the way to school this year, we made our halfway stop in West Virginia. My parents and I got off the elevator, turned the corner onto our floor, and I immediately made eye contact with a middle-aged white man wearing a t-shirt with the confederate flag printed on the front. The man had been exiting his hotel room with his child, but when he saw us he clutched the toddler almost violently, yanking her back inside the doorway. I’ve grown up surrounded by Confederate flags. Talking to a college friend when Walmart decided to stop selling Confederate flag merchandise, they asked, appalled, “Walmart sells confederate flag merch?!” From my experience, Walmart doesn’t really sell much else. It wasn’t shocking, but that isn’t to say I didn’t think about it before going to sleep that night, and it isn’t to say I didn’t get up to make sure the door was dead bolted.
... On the drive back from the beach we stopped at a gas station where a group of teenage boys were hanging out, sitting in and around a pickup truck bed from which they were flying a giant Confederate flag.
And still, people always ask, “Why are you always thinking and talking about race? It’s over, why won’t you just give it a rest?” And I wish I could, often. I feel guilty for being sad in the rented beach chair my dad saves every year to get. Arguing about protests I’m not at in neighborhoods that aren’t mine. Crying about the unmaking of bodies I never knew the making of ...
http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-happiness-here/article/2015/9/16/safety-traveling-while-black/
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