It was the first week of fifth grade and I was excited to finally be in Mr. X ‘s class after years of older cousins telling me how great he was. He wore bright, colorful Tommy Hilfiger jackets and kept his shades on the top of his head all day. He was an older white man with blonde highlights and a convertible. Impressive stuff to an early '90s kid.

He was sitting in an armchair facing the class, his preferred style of teaching. I yawned.

Almost immediately, he put his water bottle down while staring at me and said in a low voice, “What did you just do?!”

I stared back, still unsure if he was talking to me. My classmates had known me to be more or less of a goodie two shoe and looked between us baffled.

“I…I yawned ?…”

He pointed at me, shaking finger, red-faced and screamed, “If you think you’re going to be funny, I’ll send you straight to the office!”

I remember telling myself not to cry while blinking back tears. I stared down at my shaking hands. My classmates averted their eyes out of respect. We were all shook. Later that day he came up and apologized, “Hey listen, I didn’t know who you were. And It was wrong of me to yell at you without knowing you. And I’m sorry.”

It was my first time being yelled at by a teacher. My first time experiencing direct aggression from a white person. And my first time being apologized to by a grown person of any color. The day was getting away from me quick.

Disoriented, but grateful that my teacher didn’t hate me, I accepted his apology and went to the bathroom to try and work out what had just happened. He didn’t know…who I was, so… that’s why (!) he yelled at me. Um, well, who was I? And what if I wasn’t that person?    

Studies now (finally) show that black girls are over policed and more frequently seen as magnets for minor, or perceived, disciplinary infractions in school. Mr. X had asked around and some phantom authority figures had vouched that I was a “good student”.  And had he not received that kind of feedback? It would’ve been completely fine that my yawn, as mundane as it was, be projected as a weapon against his authority. It would have been acceptable for him to scream at me and send me to the office for something that happened inside of his own head. Who I was, was a black girl – someone that wasn’t allowed to move like my other classmates unless the teacher knew that I was a good student, or polite or could read well before hand. Noting this, I put a wet paper towel over my red, strained eyes and decided in that moment that I was going to continue to move in the world freely like the rest of them. And so , it was the first time this extreme racial microaggression happened but it wouldn’t be the last.

This memory was one of many that came flooding back to me that was inexplicable at the time, but hit with the urgency of a panic attack while watching Sandra Bland dragged out of her car for asking, “Why do I have to put my cigarette out?”.  Because In the mouth of a black woman the question was so egregious the justified response from hostile “white authority” was to slam her head against a Texas highway, stalk her, and tase her out of camera’s view. I watched it knowing that I had grown into a black woman who would’ve asked the exact same.

Unlike the other irrational deaths of unarmed black civilians by police officers that continuously ticked along on my feed that year, this one felt different. It wasn’t my cousin or my brother or my father. This one was me: too many questions and a tone that didn’t sit well that wouldn’t be considered anything out of the ordinary in a non-black female body. She yawned, smoked a cigarette, didn’t smile while being attacked, laughed too loudly, asked why she was under arrest, asked why she was being sent to the office… repeating loop. repeating loop. repeating loop.

I cried like someone watching their own murder, and so, I wept for her life like I was weeping for mine. I said a prayer for her and the brown women and girls like us. The ones that ask questions.

Who was she? She was a black woman, and whether directly or consequently, she died for it.

And her name was Sandra Bland.

And the sitting president wants to bolster police presence to control “the blacks."

And she would have been 30 this year on February 7, like I am.

And I’ll remember her name, and say it, until the day I die:  like I remember my own.