In this country, African-Americans are not the only ones who are suffering and distrustful of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
I am white and I feel as scared and paranoid about the police as they do.
That's because I grew up in their community and went to college in Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo.
It is not only very sad for me, but it is also a treatment to watch the fight against police violence in poor areas eventually break down.
I didn't grow up in a poor community, but my first experience with the police in my hometown was not pleasant.
In the seventh grade, I was pulled out of the class by a detective because I lent my library card to a friend who did not return the book on time. I gave a long speech.
I didn't notice that my library book was out of date.
I felt shame, fear and shame when I left.
Nevertheless, I was taught to respect the police.
They will be asked for help if needed.
That's why one night, when I was woken up by the noise outside --
In West Philadelphia floor apartment near the University of Pennsylvania campus, I immediately went to the paid phone in the lobby.
Then I stopped because the importance of what I just saw from the window went deep into my sleeping brain.
Originally, I rented a room on the sixth floor of the building, and I often greeted my two neighbors across the elevator.
They are two white women, one in her 60 s and one in her 80 s. Now at 2 a. m.
, The older lady is near the front door of the building a few feet from my studio apartment window.
On a dark night, under a bright street light, she was surrounded by eight to ten burly white men.
They pushed her back and forth, getting rougher and faster each time.
The woman who was drunk and panicked and stumbled cried and begged them to stop.
They just laughed.
All of a sudden, it suddenly occurred to me in my mind that these people were wearing Philadelphia police uniforms.
"Who am I going to call?
I asked myself. "More police?
"These are the police officers of Frank Rizzo.
Rizzo, the cowboy police chief, called on the black community to come to the Specturm parking lot in Philadelphia and shoot with his boys.
I turned around and left my neighbor on the street, shivering in fear in bed, covering my ears, trying to shut out the cries that still echo in my mind.
The next time we got a drunk on the street, it was late again at night.
He's a white old man, throwing racist crap all over the block.
He was angered by the Penn boys in the building next door and they laughed at him for getting worse.
Still, none of the hundreds living in that block called the police when he was angry.
Finally, half an hour later, my landlord husband, a Korean War vet, went out to convince the drunkard to move on.
One afternoon, I worked as a cashier at the cinema and saw a white policeman, where I met two black boys who robbed me, in West Philadelphia, the head of a young black man hit the metal edge of a police car while his black partner stood next to him.
Near Temple University in North Philadelphia, I got home from school and found a white policeman breaking into our apartment.
In order to get in and leave a bottle of pirated wine for my roommate, he smashed three locks on the door, which he took from a black bar around the corner.
Sitting at our table, hoping that she would go home, when he boasted about smashing the head of the Temple students to protest against the rising price of the campus canteen, he repeatedly struck his baton with his hammy fist.
His blonde-eyed staff, blue-eyed flashing crazy light, looks like the Nazis depicted in many of the World War II films I grew up.
Luckily, my roommate didn't go home.
He left and never came back.
After that year, I walked north along the wide street to Temple Medical School.
My new brick row
There are not a few pots of red geranium on the concrete porch near the house, but my block does have trees along the side of the road, big old trees.
I am also very happy to think of studying in the library there.
The main campus of the temple is a high
After dark every night, the closed enclave is locked tightly.
But when I first left the medical school library, a security guard stopped me.
"Do you know it's not good around here?
"I said nothing.
I was thinking, it's not as bad as the rest of the places I 've stayed in.
"Those N you have any questions. . . .
Just let me know.
"I will take care of them," he boasted . ".
I escaped and hid in my apartment.
The idea of watching another policeman hurt another person in front of me made me sick.
I can't wait to get out of my heart
Philadelphia, go somewhere else.
Philadelphia is a police state in any sense.
Rizzo himself was elected mayor and continued a repressive "occupation" of this mainly African place ".
Another decade of American cities
Outside the bus window, I first saw Madison in Wisconsin and Found and Lost Paradise, a terrible green paradise.
But when I first got to State Street, a postman greeted me and I suddenly breathed a sigh of relief, and I didn't know that I had been holding back for more than three years.
Unfortunately, the Madison police officer who was less than a few feet away pointed a gun at me, which was only a few months away.
The riots caused by the Vietnam War began on campus when students were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio and shot dead by police and highway patrolmen at Jackson State University in Mississippi.
At that time, Madison looked like Jefferson, Missouri, and every day only the National Guard lined up with rifles on the sidewalk on campus.
In the evening, the helicopter swept the spotlight of my apartment and tear gas was everywhere, even during the day.
The occupation lasted for several months.
One day, I went to the history library with a friend and felt very calm.
Suddenly we heard a commotion outside.
While looking at an Upperstory window.
When the police detonated tear gas outside, we saw two old ladies and several campus maintenance workers running across the lawn to the student union.
As we left the library to go home, we were waiting for a change in the lights, and a protester rushed over and disappeared into the crowd on the other side of the street.
Behind him was a Madison policeman with a gun in his hand.
The police turned red with anger.
When I pray that I will not be shot, his gun points to my stomach for a few seconds.
A few minutes later, the police turned around again and returned to the campus. I was shaking.
My friend is a graduate student in Boston. he asked me what happened. I told her.
"Oh no," she said with disdain, "he won't shoot us . ".
I knew then that she and the other white people I knew would never understand my fear of the police over the years.