Police in Manchester, Mo. are investigating an incident of alleged racial enmity after a Black woman says a piece of fried chicken was thrown through her car window while she was driving down the road.
Alexis Newsome believes she was targeted because of her race and shared her experience in a Facebook post this week in hopes that others might understand how it made her feel, Fox 2 St. Louis reported.
“I don’t want to have to explain this to my five-year-old. This is not fair,” Newsome said in a Facebook video, through tears. “I was scared. I almost crashed into the car next to me … I want people to understand what this feels like and what it’s like. It’s not easy living in this brown skin.”
The mother said someone in a red truck threw the chicken through her window and almost hit her in the face as she turned onto a local highway. Newsome said she thought it was an eggshell at first and said she was so shaken up that she wasn’t able to get a good description of the car.
For her, there’s only one explanation for why someone would do this.
“It’s almost something I cannot put into words about how I feel as a mom and a woman of color,” she told Fox 2. “I want people to have those conversations with people that if they hear a joke, it’s not funny. We are not doing that, we are not going to speak like that. I want people to combat all those types of hate.”
Authorities are currently checking with businesses in the area to see if surveillance cameras captured anything, according to the news station.
Via email, Manchester Police Sgt. Ed Skaggs said the suspect vehicle involved in the incident has not been identified or located as of yet.
“We are doing everything we can to identify the truck but options are very limited,” the department said in a press release Wednesday, Sept. 27. “We are checking local restaurants (drive-throughs) where the chicken may have been purchased for any red truck which may have gone through within thirty minutes or so of the incident.”