Do you feel extreme anxiety when you walk in your neighorhood or go for a drive in your car? [View all]

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...I took my 40-something year-old to work twice this week, and we talked along the way about how, years back, he'd been profiled and actually thrown to the ground by local police on the cute public paths that our community provides for joggers, hikers, and everyone else in the community to take advantage of in a sort of utopian, suburban experience that's apparently only reserved for the white people who do whatever they please on the path without being accosted.

His skin color is the only explanation for them repeatedly harassing and attacking my son hurrying with his backpack on his way to work, and, apparently they never gave him anything but a hard time in the way of explanation.

So we're driving and it's really something that he's talking about this against the very moment that I'm in the midst of an anxiety attack over a random thought I just had that we both looked like foreign laborers in my old Ford truck; and what if...?

I looked into the mirror and took a few seconds to get my head around what I was actually looking for - and there it was - I looked, for all the world like a foreign worker with my ragged cap, and then down to my ragged garden clothes I'd just kept on for the short drive; and my boy looked like one of my crew.

I'm not some shrinking violet. I can defend myself and my son against aggressive cops profiling us and pulling us over, as I have several times in the past when they were young.

But I'm human and I'm sometimes fragile, and, dammit to hell, I expect to be able to travel without feeling like a target for overzealous cops looking for a black or brown person to kick around - like we used to feel when we were young and actual targets for drug wars directed by police against the citizenry; harassment using the pretext of suspected pot use to devastate young lives.

Have you ever continuously felt like a police target when you walk in your own neighborhood or travel? Check the news about how the Supreme Court just decided, without much explanation, that ICE cops can continue to target people based on their physical attributes and the inflection of their speech.

I feel like this country has it's boot on my family's head; not just the government, but the people of this country who enabled and tolerate these abuses of humanity, decency, and law.

You ever felt like that?