If I’d reached for my ID and he’d assumed it was a gun, that encounter might’ve ended in bloodshed. Some might call that an exaggeration. I call it Breathing While Black. You don’t have to be speeding, as I was. If you’re a brother in particular, and a person of color in general, what you look like makes you vulnerable. That’s not an overstatement. It’s a truth that’s been proven over and over, with one heartbreaking headline after the next. In the Russian prison system, I was marked for a different reason. In a nation long at odds with my homeland and the West, I was, to their disgust, an
...more
