Oct 20
A buck is A Victim
I found this story on feedly, and it really hit home with me. John Henson of the Milwaukee Bucks allegedly was a victim of racial profiling in Wisconsin, which is no surprise to me. A jewelry store in Whitefish Bay wouldn’t allow the Bucks player to come inside because they thought that he was coming in to rob them.
Now, I understand that this store has been robbed before, but it wasn’t robbed by a black person . Henson believed that the jewelry store locked the doors because there were four black men coming into the store, and they may have thought they were about to get robbed.
Rather you think that the jewelry store was justified or not for locking their doors ,and calling the cops, this gives them a bad look. Even after the cops arrived and explained to the employees that this is a Milwaukee Bucks player and he presented no threat to them; the employees still wanted the cop to stay.
Henson said in a statement that he “wouldn’t wish this on anyone. This store needs to be called out.” I believe they do need to be called out  along with some of the stores in downtown Milwaukee, because I have been a victim of the same thing.
I love downtown Milwaukee , I go down there to do a little shopping every now and then. One day I had my little niece with me, just by chance I was wearing all black that day. A store called the police on me, what really got me upset was my intentions wasn’t to steal anything from this store, and they went by what I was wearing. Another thing is I had my two year old niece with me; I just feel like a lot of people ,not just black people shouldn’t have to go through things like this, but I guess this is how society is now.
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As much as I enjoy that you wrote about the subject very honestly and with your own personal experience, it saddens me that the article has to be written in the first place. Racial profile is a huge problem right now not only here, but around the world. This constant paranoia of people different than ourselves is absurd and I hope that the next few generations learn from our mistakes. When stuff like this happens to famous people, it is both shocking but almost inspiring because they are able to get their story out to a large amount of people and hopefully evoke change. Great commentary, well written.
This story was blowing up the other day. I couldn’t believe it. I read Jon Henson’s post on Instagram about this.The store will deservedly catch a lot of flak from this. From what I’ve heard and read John Henson is a very well liked and respected member of the Milwaukee community.