Amanda Gorman is detailing her recent experience with racial profiling after capturing America’s heart and making history as the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history.
The poet took to Twitter Friday, just days ahead of her 23rd birthday on March 7, to share an encounter with a “security guard (who) tailed me on my walk home tonight.”
“He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious,'” tweeted Gorman, the Harvard graduate and National Youth Poet Laureate. “I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology.”
Gorman said this latest incident of racism and discrimination highlights ever-present danger. “This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.”
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“In a sense, he was right,” Gorman added in another tweet. “I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”
Gorman experienced racial profiling just weeks after calling out “a contradictory society that can celebrate a black girl poet & also pepper spray a 9 yr old,” referring to a Black girl who was pepper sprayed and handcuffed by police in Rochester, New York in February.
“Yes see me, but also see all other black girls who’ve been made invisible,” Gorman tweeted on Feb. 14. “I can not, will not, rise alone.”
Meet Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet…
