Hi, I am an African-American woman living in France since 2011. I find myself being harassed and abused by the French police in the city where I live. For some reason, they hate me intensely and are constantly acting on their hate. They refuse to take my complaints no matter how awful the crime committed against me. They visit me every day to terrorize and worry me, unconnected to any crime or complaint. Sometimes they come in vast numbers, dressed up in riot gear. Two weeks ago, they launched a SWAT attack on my apartment, with more than 40 officers laying siege. Two days later they ambushed me and illegally seized my two dogs without a court order, without a judge involved. I need the two dogs for mental health and security reasons. They have done a huge number of things against me, from holding me hostage in my apartment for hours, chasing me, threatening me with serious violence and bodily harm, insulting me, demeaning, mocking, disgracing me to sending 40-strong SWAT teams to lay siege to my apartment over a tiny affair such as carrying my dog wrong. I’ve run out of money and I am trapped here. I’m terrorized that the French police will accidentally/intentionally kill me as I am a very small woman and many of them have expressed intense rage against me and a desire to fight me. They try to provoke me by calling me stupid, imbecile, clueless, N*****, saying they know that’s how Black people are treated in America. Please don’t tell me to go to the garbage American Embassy in Paris, the personnel are very hostile and are only nationalized French people or Philippinos anyway. The embassy offered me a $700 loan against surrendering my passport to them. What good is $700 in NYC (my city of origin)? I would be immediately homeless and not likely to recover from PTSD as a homeless person. Does anyone have any light to shed on this situation? It makes no sense that the French police are treating me like this. They have destroyed my life and now I’m deeply traumatized, suffering from PTSD and permanent insomnia. I’ve also gotten physically sick (heart, lungs, and kidneys) because of all this horror and misery they are inflicting on me, and have not been working recently. I hate to say this, and I don’t say it lightly - it appears as the police here are dangerous, deranged, lawless psychopaths. They are above the law and will never be disciplined. What do you think I should do? Any helpful comment or advice would be appreciated. If you don’t have any insight please pass it along to someone you know who does.

PS:

I have written the mayor 13 times.

I have written the District Attorney around 60 times.

I have met with the Defender of rights

I have met with legal aid counselors from numerous charitable organizations

I have called the domestic abuse hotline, the human trafficking hotline, and the violence against women hotline (half the time these fake lines don't even work)

I’ve joined the sub Reddit a few months back as I was told by a Mod I needed to be an older Reddit age to be CC approved. I’m curious as to why the Mods decided to private the sub Reddit to only CC verified accounts today?! It literally came out of no where. 😩

Reading this post (https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/qn0syt/framing/) is just making me cry. I'd like to say not all white people are like this, but obviously that's just empty words. Far too many white people are like this, and it's a problem that doesn't seem to be going away ever. I don't know what to do about anything. But I want to say that I'm sorry you have to go through this bullshit just because of the way you were born.

--white guy trying to be better than this

If its all country club, this is officially no longer a public forum.

I'm the senior mod of r/grassroots. It's been sitting, mostly unused. I'd like to donate it to the NAACP or a like-minded organization that is pursuing social change.

I don't have the largest social media presence. I'd really appreciate any tips or help in outreach.

Help me connect. Please share with anyone you can think of or any groups that are helping inform, assemble, educate, share resources, calling for justice, or fighting the political repression.

From a police community and chief who understands and walks with protestors to a police form that is a gang who is ready to fight to the death.

We need to pay attention to which communities handle this with understanding and which don’t and we need to target major change in the ones with a corrupt force.

You cannot have an energy like this unless it’s top to bottom and any city that doesn’t have a supportive police force at these times needs to be gutted and replaced with outside police from good areas and have a ton of community outreach and a focus* on rebuilding.

I am just thinking about how to move forward and accomplish real change from this. We are seeing clearly where we have the most fucked up and violent police. We need to fight most in those communities.

I am white. I say they not as a statement of superiority, nor as one of inferiority, simply as one of fact. Obviously, I do not understand the true nature of what black people go through. Being white, I could not possiblity understand. I do however grasp at least a basic understanding of it. I also understand the shittiness of humanity at large. How humans are intrinsically flawed, Including myself. There are clearly deep issues with out society. And I don't know what to do. I know what is wrong, I think it is wrong, and I don't know what I can do.

I know this is the wrong place to post this. I expect this to be removed. I simply hope I gain some insight prior to that.

Slightly less broke ,check your account

It kinda feels... uncomfortably commodifying? In a way? It just grosses me out. Especially given the US's legacy of putting black skin in the spotlight and making black people perform for the white man's pleasure. Getting verified is not the same as minstrelsy, but I can't help but feel that, in some ways, I am continuing the motions in what was previously a very long cycle of degrading performances.

My brown skin is not a performance to satisfy people.

And before anyone calls me out on being lazy (😒) or a prude, I would be more than happy to become verified the white way. IIRC, that would involve writing an essay about how shitty white people have been to minorities for the last 300 years in the US. I can do that in my sleep.

Actually, scratch that. I already do that in my sleep.

Anywho, it's beyond obvious that I'm black so it's weird the mods can't take 8 seconds to check my post history, I've made only a handful of posts over the last seven years I've been on Reddit. You can easily look and see how passionate I've been about exposing the toxicity this world has shown me as a gay black guy.

Seven years.

Why can't that be enough to verify me? Why do I have to do something so dehumanizing, if only mildly, to get verified while white people can easily write something to get verified? I've lived this shit and have the frustrated, angry post history to show for it. Let me the fuck in.

Sorry for my language. I'm sure you can imagine it pisses me off when I have to jump through hoops because of my race. I already get that on Grindr. Don't need it on Reddit.

Edit:

As far as I'm concerned, this is my verification:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gay/comments/1cdybi/after_years_of_online_dating_and_hardly_ever/?st=K6VGI89K&sh=8367405f

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaymers/comments/x49q0/can_someone_please_tell_me_its_going_to_get/?st=K6VGK1ZT&sh=083c735b

https://www.reddit.com/r/GayBroTeens/comments/yj0os/any_gaybro_teens_of_color_out_there_jw_sometimes/?st=K6VGKXSQ&sh=ea51bf17

pls

edit: whoops http://imgur.com/a/Q9Shqra

I think some posts we can already tell are going to get derailed before we even submit them and by the time they turn into CC threads the damage has already been done. I think it would be a good move to allow this option.

Edit: here's the comment. Maybe it can do some good from here:

When people talk about the repercussions of slavery, honestly, that's a simplification. When we talk about repercussions of slavery, we're not simply talking about being forced to work with no pay. I think if we were only talking about that and the misery that comes with it, the situation is a little more comparable to the "struggling" immigrant living in the US--each group was working hard and getting scraps in return and is now trying to find a better life. But when we talk about American slavery, we're talking about a whole slew of things. American slavery is more than working for no pay, it's about creating a social hierarchy, reinforced by government policies, that diverts tangible and intangible benefits to white people at the expense of black people and spans generations.

Social hierarchy: With slavery (referring to American slavery when I say this) came a new type of social hierarchy where white people were deemed to be good normal people and black people were deemed to be something less than human. As such, black people were expected to live completely separately from white people so as not to pollute white people spaces with their unflattering appearances and brazen ignorance (🙄). Black people weren't supposed to be in relationships with white people. They weren't supposed to hold positions of power. And so on and so forth

Reinforced by government policies: The government backed up this social hierarchy 100% (ok fine there were a few decent people so like 99.9%). The first thing that comes to my mind was when the importation of slaves was banned so we made it so that anyone born to a slave was a slave. So fucked up. And we just kept doing stuff like that over and over again. Black people aren't allowed to learn to read. Black people can't become citizens. And so on and so forth. Anything to make sure people remained dumb slaves and had dumb slave children who had dumb sharecropper children, etc.

Diverts tangible and intangible benefits: So everyone sees how people got wealthy off of slavery. Slave labor costs much less than paying someone a normal human wage. Everyone gets that, but we're talking about humans so you have to remember the social benefits too, as humans are very social creatures. Education was concentrated among white people during slavery. That made it hard for non-white people to get in with the upper echelon of society and all of the benefits that come with that. Not to mention, that also makes it harder to get a good job. It was heavily frowned upon for slaves to be educated. And outside of education, it was simply considered lower class to be or do anything black. Sounding black was bad and a sign of a lack of education and stupidity (as wrong as that may be). Looking black was ugly and apelike. Black people culturally had certain foods, songs, dances, etc, and all of that was looked down upon among white people (even if they got to enjoy some of the things from a distance). Black people were socially excluded and lost access to many circles and people that could potentially yield tangible, material benefits.

Spans generations: This is the kicker that people don't seem to understand for some reason. Slavery and the surrounding social hierarchy was constructed to last decades and beyond. As I noted, we passed laws that made descendants of slaves slaves themselves. We passed laws making it easier for runaway slaves to be sent back to work. And we taught everyone, explicitly and non-explicitly, that it was bad to be black. People, black and white, told their kids. Those kids grew up and told their kids. Those kids grew up and told their kids. And so on. And while people were sort of verbally telling their kids what your place was based on your race. You also had celebrated institutions that reinforced those ideas. Minstrel shows making fun of black people. Children's rhymes and books depicting black people as ignorant animals. Laws that kept black people away from white people. All of that stuff lived on past their creators.

And so now we get to today. If you think about the effects of slavery today, it should sort of remind you of scars. A person gets cut and that cut becomes a scar, and the skin never really returns to the way it was before. You can still see where the person was originally cut. And just like you can see the signs of a cut even after the scar has faded a bit, you can still see the lasting impact of the era of slavery in the United States. Black people still largely live in places where their ancestors lived, so there are many black people concentrated in poor communities in the South. Some slave descendants and runaway slaves did leave the South. Many of their children and grandchildren moved north to places like Chicago and New York. These descendants were poor and lived in poor communities and more than likely, their children were poor too. So people kept being born and raised in poor communities and then having kids who would suffer the same fate. And the social stigmas around being black also remain. Something like 30% of Republicans today think interracial marriage is wrong. In dating, dark skin is heavily frowned upon while white skin and features are often cherished. Even though most people don't go around saying black people are inferior; there's still rampant unconscious bias against black people and in favor of white people. Black people are faintly viewed as dumb aggressive savages--on an unconscious level. And this can make it hard for people to get a good job or even just walk around their neighborhood without suffering negative consequences.

Social networks have also remained largely separate between white and black people. And that's important when you remember that people usually hear about jobs and potential partners and other benefits through their social networks. So the benefits concentrated in white social networks have remained there as the two groups have remained separate. People don't talk and live and sleep together because their parents didn't and their parents didn't and their parents didn't all the way back until it was initially banned for black people to interact with white people on a large scale.

Sorry I'm writing really quickly to get in before the thread is for country club only. Please excuse grammatical errors. I hope this helped.

This was really a tl;dr of African American history. I missed a lot of atrocities and some pretty amazing moments too that would make you proud of different people who stood up to evil. I hope you can see that, compared with recent immigrants, who often come to America with a social network already in place (i.e. friends and family they know who can help them get a job and navigate the education system), black people--who generally didn't plan to come to the US and thrive socially and economically in the first place, have gotten the really short end of the stick. Black people born here come into a world where, more often than not, their social networks have few tangible benefits, their family and friends are uneducated and don't know how to navigate the educational system, society isn't a big fan on an unconscious level, and the government's like "ok go you don't need help you'll be fine hehe." Immigrants tend to have much better social networks that find them housing and jobs. Immigrants tend to come to the US with more education. Immigrants are definitely hurt on an unconscious level, so that is totally comparable to the black struggle in the US. Immigrants also don't receive too much help from the government, especially in recent months.

Edit: proofreading after posting

Hello /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/BPTmeta!

We need your help to fight online hate!

I work with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit organization that has been fighting for racial justice since 1963. As you probably (unfortunately) know, online hate has become a huge problem, especially for people of color. One-in-four African Americans and one-in-ten Latinos have been targeted for online harassment because of their race, compared with only 3% of whites. Women are targeted at double the rate of men.

One of our programs, the Stop Hate Project, seeks to combat white supremacy and other forms of hate—especially online—and to provide support to affected communities. Recently, we won a major legal case against online neo-Nazis who targeted the first black female student government president of American University.

We want to bring another case to extend existing civil rights laws to protect social media. To do that, we need to find someone who has been targeted by online hate, threats, discrimination, or harassment. As members of one of the leading communities of people of color on Reddit, we know that you are particularly at risk of becoming targets of hate, so we’re asking for your help.

If you’ve been a target of online hate, we’d like to hear about your experience. We want to learn more about the needs of the black community online, and do what we can to connect you with helpful resources. We cannot promise legal support in every instance, but our Stop Hate Project is plugged in to support, legal, and community organizations nationwide.

This is an important moment in the struggle against hate. We need your help to advance the cause of civil rights into the 21st century. Please share your stories with us at nohate@lawyerscommittee.org, find resources at www.8449nohate.org, or call us at 1-844-9-NO-HATE. We will protect your privacy and keep confidential whatever you tell us.

Sean Bickford

Legal Fellow for Privacy & Technology

Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Remember those? Pepperidge Farm remembers.