It’s My Bag

Some years ago when I lived in DC and worked for the Washington Post, I had a friend that I met frequently for lunch a few time a month. We’d haunt the bookstops and other shops and each time I made a purchase he would always ask me why I took a bag for my purchase even if was just one magazine or even one bag of chips and soda. Each time my answer was the same…”its a black thing!” I never bothered to explain this and even Hannamari had asked me once in a while as well as others. “Save a tree” they’d say. Or, “Do know that plastic bag would take a hundred years to biodegrade?” I still took the bag.

A few days ago, my friend contacts me and says, “I get why you take the bag!” The story he told vindicated me. It seems that while he was home in Arizona he had gone to a mall to a store and observed a young black man make a purchase of an item. When asked if he wanted a bag by the cashier, the young man declined. Purchase in hand he left the store only to be confronted by a rent-a-cop just outside the door. He was asked to return to the cashier to verify his purchase and responded that he would do no such thing and stated that he HAD purchased the items. However the  rent-a-cop didn’t wait for the young man to finish his explanation, but tried to phyiscally force him back into the store using a arm-lock and other tactics, whereupon the young man suffered a broken arm in the process.

Onlookers tried to tell the rent-a-cop that they had seen the youth pay for the item but their pleas fell on deaf ears. The youth was force into a back corner of the store and was forced to wait in agony while the police arrived. The cashier was informed of the actions later and rushed to tell the police that the young man had paid of the item, whereupon the police released him and called for medical assistance. The cashier also called the manager, who had been absent from the store at the store at the time of the incident. My friend was motified by the whole thing.

The moral of this tale is that I ALWAYS get the bag! Its nice that we have a black president and that maybe things are getting better on the race level, but until I am no longer racially profiled in neighborhoods where I can afford to live, or am followed around a store from the minute I step in the door, or have someone actually cross the street when they see me coming, then the BAG is my only recourse.