Lawyer Sean Carter said the package will stay on his doorstep until UPS comes to get it. (Image courtesy of Facebook/Sean Carter)
After a package was mistakenly delivered to his Arizona home, a Black lawyer says he’d rather wait for UPS to come get the parcel and deliver it to the right address than walk it over to his neighbor’s home on the next block himself. His reasons might surprise you.
In a lengthy Facebook post, Sean Carter wrote that he nor his teenage son would be delivering the package because “we are Black.”
“It is extremely unsafe to send our boys to the home of any family that we do not know in this predominantly white neighborhood,” Carter explained Friday. “Why? Because there’s a realistic chance that one of my neighbors will see my boy as a threat and call the police or even pull a gun on him.”
“That’s why this f—–g package will be sitting on my porch until UPS retrieves it,” he continued. “Because I cannot trust that my white neighbors won’t see me, a Harvard-educated lawyer (or my 14 y/o honor student son) as a roaming homicidal maniac.”
Carter brought up the case of 14-year-old Black boy Brennan Walker, who nearly lost his life after knocking on a stranger’s door in Rochester Hills, Mich. to ask for directions after he missed the bus to school earlier this month. The female homeowner suspected Walker was trying to rob her in broad daylight and summoned her husband, who opened fire on the young teen.
“THIS is what it’s like to be Black in ‘post-racial’ America,” the concerned father wrote.
Carter’s post has garnered over 15,000 comments since Friday, drawing mixed reactions from users. Carter said he’s received countless messages from white folks who could not wrap their heads around why he should be afraid. Then there were those who accused him of “race- baiting” and being a “p—y” for refusing to put his son in danger by sending him to a stranger’s doorstep.
Out of the thousands of comments, Carter said there wasn’t a single suggestion on how to “stop white folks from being irrationally afraid of black people in their neighborhoods, demonstrating that while black lives still don’t matter worth a damn, all package deliveries do,” the Daily Mirror reported.
“Why the vitriol?” Carter wrote in a follow-up post.” Because I am afraid for my children? And? Even if my fear was completely irrational, is that a reason for anger and hatred?
