Picture this: you find your one true love, you get married, everything’s just like in the movies. Even better, you get this great job.

You find yourself a nice home to share with your bae out in the suburbs. And then things start to go wrong. Your new white neighbors start calling you nigger.

You shake it off; you’ve heard it all before.

Then, while you’re asleep, some wonderful child of God scrawls ‘nigger’ on your beautiful home.

You sigh. It’s not great, but, this is America after all. You head down to the hardware store and spend your weekend covering the graffiti up.

Then you walk outside to find ‘nigger’ there again.

And then it happens again. And again. And again.

Finally, you say enough is enough.

At least, that’s what Lexene Charles and Heather Lindsay are saying.

The interracial couple — Charles is black, Lindsay is white — live in Stamford, Connecticut, and, according to Lindsay, have lived with episodes of vandalism and slurs being hurled at them since 1999.

When ‘nigger’ was written in bold black spray paint on their garage just before Martin Luther King Day, the husband and wife decided to leave it there until the police found the culprit. Lindsay says although she has reported similar cases to Stamford police in the past, each time she’s been forced to watch the police “cover it up and sweep it under the table.”

In response to the couple’s decision not to whitewash the slur, the city of Stamford issued Mr. and Mrs. Charles a blight citation that fines them $100 a day for each day they go without removing the word.

Stamford’s director of public safety, Ted Jankowski, told the Stamford Advocate, “The neighbors were very upset when the incident occurred and truly felt for the couple. However, the residents who have condemned the racial incident are upset and are complaining about continuing to see the racial slur and how it is disturbing the peace in the quiet neighborhood.”

Stamford’s NAACP chapter has stepped in to help Lindsay and Charles, but so far it seems little investigative action has been taken. Unfortunately, as Lindsay to ABC 7 News, “racism is alive here in our neighborhood.”

Heather Lindsay

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