Surprise is for people who weren’t listening.

I was 7 or 8 years old the first time I can remember being racially profiled.

In small-town South Carolina, especially in the 90s, we had less of today’s Karens looking for ways to point out the flaws of others. Today, if you see a kid wandering around K-Mart, someone is likely to call the cops, whereas I grew up going into stores regularly to pick up a few things while my mom sat outside in the car. It was one of those trips. My mom had sent me into K-Mart with a list of stuff to buy while she sat in the car parked upfront by the curb and listened to The Bible on tape (unless she was listening to The Tom Joyner Morning Show on V101.9, all she listened to in the car was The Bible on tape, so fill in another piece of the puzzle of This Is Why I Am This Way.)

I paid for my items and carried my little bag out of the store, but the security alarm went off as I was exiting. An older white woman was leaving at the same and the security guard waved her on with a “have a nice day, ma’am,” while he walked over to accost me for stealing. That woman was stealing, and I know this, because I was not stealing. The guard made a decision that one of us was the likely criminal and he chose the child in elementary school carrying a K-Mart bag and a receipt. I don’t remember him looking outside for my mom or asking where my parents were. I just remember following him to an office where he matched up the items on the receipt with the stuff in my bag. Once everything was accounted for, he asked me what else I had. I was wearing a shortset, so I had nowhere to hide anything. I couldn’t have been down there very long, but a midday trip to K-Mart should be short, so my mom was in the store looking for me pretty quickly. A cashier told her where I was and I could hear her yelling way before she got to the door.

Everything was fine. I didn’t get into any trouble. But I do have a core memory of being accused of theft by a white man and how nice he was to the white woman and her shopping cart before he turned to scowl at me instead.

I’ve noticed a series of events centered on Breaking News that seems to follow a pattern during this administration.

Something is about to happen. News circulates that there will be an announcement or that legislation is up for a vote or that the Supreme Court is about to rule on something.

The news is discussed. People from all corners weigh in, but there is a hefty contingent who refuses to believe that the outcome will be bad.

The outcome is bad. The shitty legislation was passed. The Supreme Court ruled the wrong way.

People are distraught. There is a fresh wave of realization that the United States they thought they lived in was an ideal held together with Elmer’s glue and confetti.

Most of those people are white.

The Supreme Court has given ICE a pass to round up anyone they suspect of being an undocumented immigrant, so this means anyone who looks Latino, is speaking Spanish, is doing day laborer work, is attending the Mexican Day parade — it really doesn’t matter. Discrimination due to race, ethnicity, appearance, circumstance, etc. is back on the board and people are rightfully upset.

There are three groups that I see on social media.

Group One says we are pissed off, we’re going to fight for a better country, and we’re going to fix this. These are motivated activist types without whom there would never be any forward progress. Many folks in Group One have no illusions about the kind of country the US is, but they believe in the overall decency of people as a whole, and they believe we can live in a country where decent people have a louder voice than assholes.

Group Two shrinks in number with each news cycle — they’re despondent over the loss of a country they loved. Every few weeks, there are more people who come face to face with a lifting of the veil showing the American Truth versus the American Dream. I remain shocked each time by how many other people are shocked that something shitty happened to yet another group of people in this country. I was in third grade the first time someone lifted the veil, and it was when I was sitting in a cold loss prevention office of a run-down K-Mart. Any remnants of the veil went up in flames in 2016. I know exactly where I live.

And that puts me in Group Three with a lot of other people, many of whom are Black. We’re all looking around us at the shocked faces thinking, “Did you never listen to anything Black people have been telling you for the past 160 years when we’ve been allowed to whisper a testimony?”

Until we all are free, we are none of us free. Rights are just privileges unless they are applied to everyone, equally, all of the time. Otherwise, they can be taken away from anyone, at the discretionary whims of power, any time.

The last time the NYPD stopped me for being Black, I was rounded up with a sweep of men taken off the D train at Columbus Circle around 4:30 or 5 am. Officer Francavilla was giving me attitude because I wasn’t giving him the appropriate level of respect he thought was owed to him as a big racist dummy with a badge. I was actually too tipsy to be scared (I was on my way home after the bars closed) so I don’t have any big emotions tied to that stop.

The scariest stop was a year or two before that in Harlem. I was walking across town, not on 125th street, because I wasn’t on a main thoroughfare, but very close to it, so we can say 127th. It was late at night and I was wearing khaki pants, a denim jacket over a beige zip-up hoodie, and a Charlotte Hornet’s baseball cap. The hood was up and I had headphones in, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the sounds of the neighborhood. It was late fall or early winter, so my hair was straight and it was up in a bun under my baseball cap.

I didn’t notice I had walked by some cops, because you’re always walking by cops in Harlem, but I guess they had called after me a couple of times without me noticing. I either heard foosteps or a voice, but when I pulled out my earbud and made to turn around, an officer grabbed me by the arm, pulled it behind my back, and pushed me forward into a wall. He said I matched the description of a robbery suspect and that I was being detained because I had been ignoring their commands. I don’t match the descriptions of many people because I’m a 6′ Black man with a septum ring and straight hair a few inches past bra-strap length. However, I knew I was on my way to Rikers Island. Earlier that summer, Kalief Browder had been in the news because he had hanged himself. The NYPD arrested him for stealing a backpack in 2010, held him in custody without a trial until 2013, and then let him go after he had spent over 700 days in solitary confinement. Two years after his release, he killed himself.

The cops had me pressed against the wall with the left side of my face against the bricks. My hood had fallen back but I still had on my baseball cap, so I turned my head to face the wall straight on and pushed the bill of my cap into the bricks. I motioned down with my head until the cap came off, and all 20 inches of hair came tumbling down. I was hoping that whoever’s description I matched didn’t have any hair, and I was correct. The “frisk” part of the famed NYPD Stop and Frisk paused for a second as they realized they had the wrong person, but he completed his search. Another cop was running my ID while yet another was asking questions about what I was doing, where I lived, where I was going, etc.

I wasn’t arrested or booked or charged. I wasn’t hurt and none of my property was damaged (on another stop, the cops broke my phone and I’m still waiting for the NYPD to pay for it ten years later). Still, this is the country I already knew, that skin color was a valid reason for the authorities to stop you and assume you broke a law.

Every fight is your fight. Every injustice is an injustice against you. You think trans people using the bathroom or unready mothers getting an abortion are issues that affect other people and therefore do not concern you.

You also thought the way the federal government treated Black communities during the crack epidemic had nothing to do with you, and now your white cousins in Appalachia and rust belt suburbs are just trying to get help to kick opium habits and stay out of prison.

You thought Fiscal Conservatives creating boogeymen out of single Black mothers and building Welfare Mom propaganda had nothing to do with you, and now your Grandma is watching her SNAP benefits chopped in half anytime Republicans get a bug up their ass about more tax breaks for Bezos.

You thought police departments rounding up Black people was just crime prevention and now they’re detaining your neighbors for speaking Spanish.

If you want to live in the country you thought you lived in, you need to pay attention every time a marginalized group is telling you what’s happening to them. Don’t wait for the Supreme Court to “surprise” you with a racist ruling when the warning alarms have been sounded from the time your great-grandma was riding by chain gangs and looking the other way.

The country you live in still forces Black men to pick cotton while a white man on a horse rides by to make sure they’re going fast enough, but they call it a “prison job” instead of slavery.