“I don’t have a knife.”
“I know you have a knife
somewhere. Where is it?”
He searched and searched and
finally gave up and let me in,
looking me over like I was trouble.
“No shit from you! Okay?”
I figured that if I was in jail
people were going to assume I was
the kind of colored person who
ends up in jail, a violent criminal.
So I played it up. I put on this
character; I played the stereotype.
Anytime the cops asked me
questions I started speaking in
broken Afrikaans with a thick
colored accent. Imagine a white guy