Blame it on The Black Kid...

In the scene of any crime in America, the police look out for any sweat-wearing-pant-sagging-hooded-suspicious-looking black teenager, and then blame them first; at least that’s what most Hollywood movies depict.  Unfair as this may seem, it has become the norm.

A couple of days ago, I attended a party with my friend Jane and her kids.  She called me earlier

today to ask if I had seen something she was missing, I said I hadn’t, and we began to think of the people who had been in the bag room at the particular time she had put the nylon in her bag.

Like a flash of revelation, we both reached the same conclusion; it had to be the cleaning lady, I mean, it couldn’t have been the 5 or 6 other people who had been in there at that time, right? Nah, it was definitely the cleaning lady.  She did look a bit shifty, and did we not see her stuff something in her bag? Ha!  The thief!  How dare her!

Quickly, and in a fit of righteous indignation, Jane called the shifty-looking-cleaner’s employer and gave her a piece of her mind.  You can imagine how sorry her employer was, and she promised to look into it.

Ten minutes later, Jane sheepishly called back to say she had seen the missing nylon behind a door in her house.  OMG!  What had we done?  We had just given a dog a bad name, and hung it.  That woman’s only crime was that she was a cleaner, why hadn’t we suspected the 5 or 6 other people that had been in there?  Were we, like the police in these movies so blinded by the idea of “class”, that we thought the rich were above stealing?  Does it really have to be the black kid, or the cleaner?

I know a lot of us are guilty of this; we blame the” poor” first.  It can’t be the rich man or woman right? Even though that innocent woman did not know my sin against her, I felt so ashamed of myself at that moment. I have asked God for forgiveness, and definitely learned a valuable lesson today.