Father writes open letter to the aggressor.
There has been an upsurge in the number of hate crimes targeting blacks, Muslims and other religious minorities in the US recently.
Usually, people respond aggressively if they experience hate crimes or racial profiling. But, a father in Baltimore chose a different way to respond to a stranger who jabbed his 8-year-old son in the neighborhood.
The father, whose identity has not been revealed, has written a letter to his neighbor asking why he poked his innocent son while he was standing on the road.
“Dear Neighbor, Please forgive me for this odd way of getting in touch. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t think we’ve met. But I’ve been thinking about you all morning, wishing that we had the chance to talk face to face. I’m still troubled by what you did on the Monday night before Thanksgiving, around the corner from where I live in Baltimore. I can’t make sense of why you jabbed my 8-year-old boy,” the father wrote in the letter which was published by Baltimore Sun.
The father explains that the incident happened at around 6 pm at 37th Street when his four-year-old daughter was learning how to ride a bicycle. His eight-year-old son and his grandfather were also nearby.
“Maybe you remember what my son looks like — he was wearing a blue jacket and a yellow hoodie. He has black hair and brown skin. He told us that he heard you come up behind him. He told us that you looked at each other under the streetlight. He told us that he stepped aside to let you pass. He told us that you stepped over right behind him, instead of walking past when he’d given you the chance,” said the father.
The stranger jabbed some kind of sharp metallic stick into the boy’s back and said: “Get out of my way, you boy!” Though the boy wasn’t hurt badly, he complained of the pain on his hack for a few hours.
At one point, the father points to the recent increase in racial violence in the country recently. But, still, he doesn’t want to jump into conclusions based on that. Instead, he says, “We are not in your way. We are from here as much as you are,” read the letter. He forgives the stranger for what he has done and reminds that he too may have kids and they may have played together.
The letter ends with a hope that he had a chance to meet him and talk sometime “under less dark and threatening circumstances.”