I only see a couple dozen sun kissed faces on this campus daily. And that is something that I’ve wanted to address about the sun kissed community at Penn State since it was brought to my attention; there are only a couple thousand of us. With such small numbers, and with the majority group dominating everything from leadership roles to faculty positions, my brothers and sisters sometimes feel that they don’t have a leg to stand on. The question is: how can we feel respected and recognized with such small numbers? And also, how can we seek justice for things that we see, but other groups don’t even have to recognize?

Just this past weekend, my cousin who’s my age was leaving campus with her mother and two sisters in their family car. It took no further than three blocks for the police to pull my cousin and her family over, outside of the CVS downtown. The officers called it a “random license plate check,” and proceeded to make them take all of their things out of the car. They even had to take my cousin’s 3 month old sister out of the car and place her on the sidewalk while the cops had a towing company hook it up. To add insult to injury, the towing company sent their man, clad in a confederate flag t-shirt that read “The South Shall Rise Again,” to take the car. A few minutes after I got there, the cop turned to this young man and asked, “How’s your grandfather doing?” I suppose they know each other very well.

Seeing the tears in my cousin’s eyes does not leave me with much else more than disdain for the racists who dwell within and around this campus. This man’s shirt really got me thinking. I don’t use the word racist to depict just anybody that I feel personally are trying to harm us; and I recognize that not everybody is out to get us. And maybe those cops did see something they needed to harp on; but for them to call it “random” is where I see some nonsense. They could’ve articulated the nature of the stop and actually given a reasonable answer. The man’s shirt was just the icing on a cake of ideas that people who are sun kissed have swarming in their heads in moments like those and it’s very disheartening. I can’t say that the same situation would’ve made the same bad impression on someone who isn’t sun kissed, and that makes me care for these kinds of situations less than I care for the All Lives Matter movement.

We know that all lives matter, that isn’t something that I nor anybody with sense can really debate. Historically though, racist and bigoted people did not treat sun kissed people as if their lives mattered, unless we were the ones building the cotton industry for free. Unless we were the ones filling up factory positions for cheap and keeping money in their pockets so their future generations didn’t have to worry about things like tuition. And it is a damn shame that we even have to make a campaign for our own lives and then have it thrown back at us by the same people who didn’t think we mattered. That’s exactly how the Black Panthers became synonymous with rebellion; because little do people know that they had to arm themselves to fight off police brutality.

To me and my thick skin, I could care less if someone doesn’t think I count. But if I see the tears in my sun kissed brothers and sisters’ eyes, that’s when I feel like wearing black leather and stepping up to point guns at the people who point guns at us, and that’s just pure honesty. And things like this piss me off to no end: “When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished.  If however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”  It brings me to question that moral compass on which humans rely; I wonder if disregarding others is just the natural thing to do and if I should be that way as well just to feel totally human. But for my own sanity I have to try to understand. And even with a passion for grasping the reason behind actions, I stand firm in my resolve, and if anybody on this planet earth tries to raise a rod to my back and scar my sun kissed skin out of ignorant hate, for my ancestors, I will give that person hell on earth.

Let’s be clear, I make no assumption that those cops or anybody in particular is against us. Even if they are, respect and understanding is absolutely non-negotiable for me so I remain respectful in all given situations. But to say that means to confront my own emotions and keep them in check, so I cannot wear that black leather and pack heat every time somebody brings tears to my family’s eye. I choose to take my time in understanding why those individuals feel the way that they do and how I can properly A) avoid them, or B) change their perspective of us. Their presence doesn’t negate the presence of genuine people, like Sydney Mingle for example. I could choose to see her blue eyes and straight hair as the epitome of the opposition, which admittedly, a certain number of us do. Or I could choose to see her as my homegirl and hold absolutely no negative feelings towards her because she has done nothing more than show me love and friendship. But the people who are open about how they feel our friendship is the work of evil reminds me that I can put the black leather on whenever I see fit.