The only way Black Republicans will learn a lesson is the hard way

When I saw my phone light up and looked at the caller ID, I was a little confused. It wasn’t that he never called me before. It just seemed peculiar for him to call me during evening hours instead of us briefly texting or chatting before heading to lunch or working on a project together during business hours.

From the minute he started talking, the invisible cape that Black women wear presented itself. This biracial man — who didn’t know his Black father and his white mother passed away fairly early so he was raised by his conservative white stepfather — had been pulled over by the police for the first time in his life.

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I was surprised that it hadn’t happened earlier in life, but he has a Zendaya-type face. You can’t quite tell if he’s African-American, of Black descent outside of the U.S., Afro Latino or Puerto Rican. He has too much of a permanent tan and his lips are too full to ever be mistaken for white, but his vibe gives off, “I didn’t hang out with many Black people growing up.” Inside of a car, though, I could see why someone would just think he was a light-skinned Black man.

During the phone call, he told me he was stunned by the amount of police cars that showed up for him while he was speeding. His wife, who is white, was in a separate car and had no idea her husband had been stopped by three or four police cars. And although he was baffled by the aggressive tone and the accusations being thrown at him, I was once again surprised by why he was surprised — even as a Black woman who has had both notably positive and definitely negative interactions with police. (A lady police officer once gave me homemade cookies to apologize for how slow the computers were in filing a police report for a hit-and-run.)

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Regardless of fresh cookies, he and I had argued endlessly about the topic of racism on countless other occasions — with him acting like Malcolm X was damn near Satan and declaring Trayvon Martin was a grown man. But here he was, muttering about how the police were overreacting and then accusing them of gasp racism. I finally asked him why he called me instead of telling this story to his wife. He paused because he knew the answer. His wife would never deal with the type of behavior he did and he’d have to admit that maybe racial profiling isn’t a figment of Black people’s imagination.

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(Mild spoiler alert: In many ways, he reminds me of the biracial daughter in Cebo Campbell’s “Sky Full of Elephants.” Outside of my hometown of Chicago (a chapter I was extremely proud to read), far too many characters in this book chased this one entitled lady around while trying to change her mind and become their “brother/sister/daughter.” Meanwhile, my eyes rolled to the back of my head at her — and all of The Walkers — antics.

This book would've been four pages long if left up to a character mirroring my personality.) I’d rather let stubborn Black Republicans who didn’t listen to the late Colin Powell (and even non-political people who think like Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas) fall on their faces and learn the lesson the hard way, similar to the associate who was pulled over for speeding.