Weekend Warriors

It was Friday evening. The weekend just officially started as I got back home from office. It gets dark early these days after the daylight savings time ended in early November. By 6:30 pm, it was pitch black outside. The doorbell rang and our dog, true to his guard dog instinct, darted towards the front door, barking loudly. Thinking it must be a package delivery guy, I peeped outside and saw an African American youth standing outside our front door--with his hands up.

It took me a few seconds to put the dog in his room and come back. By that time, the young man was already walking away. I opened the door and called him back. 

“Why did you feel the need to have your hands up?” I was genuinely curious to know. "Were you trying to gesture that you are unarmed?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Anthony said (I am not disclosing his full name to preserve his privacy). “I am aware that I am a black man showing up uninvited within your property after dark. If I were you, I myself would have hesitated to open the door,” he added. “So thank you for trusting me.”

The poignancy of that moment forced me to write this blog. 

This young man with impeccable manners, may be in his upper teens or early twenties, is trying to make an honest living by selling magazine subscription, pet accessories and kids toys. As it is, door-to-door selling is one of the toughest jobs to earn a living from. But imagine having to do that while fearing for your life, in your own country, because the color of your skin!

I remember chatting with one of my African American classmates, when both of us were in law school, about how her mother taught her brother to always stay out of trouble in order to stay alive! Somehow it did not make me feel any better that a black mom needed to teach her son things that even I, an immigrant mother of brown skin, did not need to teach mine.

Coincidentally, this weekend I was catching up on the past episodes of Patriot Act, the Netflix talk show series by Indian-origin comedian Hasan Minhaj. In one of his recent episodes titled “The Broken Policing System,” Minhaj reminded the viewers that it has been more than five years since the peak of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, but black youths like Anthony are far from not having to fear for their lives as long as the law enforcement officers are trained at the very beginning of their career to “warrior policing” techniques rooted deeply in racial distrust.

But one has to keep hope alive.  I hope my opening the door to Anthony shows my son that America is not stuck in the Jim Crow era that he is reading about in “To Kill a Mockingbird”--his assigned reading for ninth grade. I watched the movie before, but never read the book. I decided to read the book in parallel with my son to be able to have a deeper conversation with him. I downloaded the audiobook and kept listening during my longish drive to and from San Francisco on Saturday morning to volunteer with the Development School for Youth (DSY), organized by a national non-profit for helping inner-city youths, many of them African Americans, connect with adult professionals who can help them succeed in life. I got to meet bright youngsters like Destiny, who chose a colorful superhero name--"Red Wings"--for herself during an ice-breaker exercise with the volunteers. I came back home with heart overflowing with hope to begin the Thanksgiving week in the right spirit.

Some of us are just weekend warriors, but certainly not the wrong kind of warriors.