This latest installment of in the Real Racism series comes to us from Chicago.
According to Susan Pederson, she had just dropped a friend off on the South Side, near the University of Chicago, and was driving home with her two small children in the back.
She stopped at a light. And here, according to Eric Horng\’s article for ABC affiliate WLS-TV, is what happened then:
Police say two people were arrested and charged, but Susan Pedersen says several dozen people were involved in the attack that left her two children covered in broken glass. They were in the back seat of the vehicle, which was left dented with the rear glass shattered.
Pedersen says she had just dropped off a friend at the University of Chicago when she stopped at a red light and found her car surrounded by several dozen young people.
“They were walking around both sides of the vehicle – in the front, in the back – and as they were walking across, they were hitting my car, using racial slurs and telling me that I didn\’t belong in their neighborhood because I was white,” Pedersen said.
The group, all African-American, she says, kicked the vehicle and shook it violently. Her children were screaming from the back of the vehicle.
The broken glass left cuts on her 3-year-old son, Benjamin.
Two juveniles were arrested, police said. They were charged with misdemeanor criminal damage to property.
Pedersen says the crime damaged more than her property. She would like more serious charges filed.
“This is something that\’s going to stay with me for the rest of my life,” she said.
This is some world. A mob terrorizes a woman and her children, injuring one of them, and the charge is “misdemeanor criminal damage to property. Lucky they didn\’t refuse to bake a same-sex cake.
Suppose this had been reversed. Suppose a Black woman dropped off a friend in a White neighborhood, then she and her children were physically and verbally attacked by a mob of Whites, using racial slurs as they damaged her car and injured her child, while telling her she didn\’t belong in their neighborhood because she was Black. Do you think it would have gone past local news coverage?
Let me go out on a limb here, and say there\’s at least a slight possibility.
Real racism. It comes in all forms from all sources. No group is immune to it or from it. Certainly not a mob of young thugs whose idea of a good time is to racially, and physically, terrorize a woman and her children.
