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Amanda Gorman says she was racially profiled as ‘threat’ outside her home, Internet says it’s 'not Jim Crow era'

'A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight. He demanded if I lived there because 'you look suspicious.' I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology,' Gorman said

The first National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, who moved the nation with her poem 'The Hill We Climb', was racially profiled outside her own home. The 22-year shared the alleged incident that occurred Friday, March 5, on her Twitter handle, revealing how she was observed as a "threat". 

The tweet read, "A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight. He demanded if I lived there because 'you look suspicious.' I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat."

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She shared a screengrab of her tweet on Instagram and wrote in her caption, "In a sense, he was right. 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. A threat and proud."

Gorman shared the Friday incident in response to her reaction to a tweet shared in February, acknowledging a Washington Post's piece about her rise and the difference between her and other Black girls. 

The earlier tweet read, "Wow, a fantastic @washingtonpost piece by @nnekamcguire. We live in a contradictory society that can celebrate a black girl poet & also pepper spray a 9 yr old. Yes see me, but also see all other black girls who've been made invisible. I can not, will not, rise alone."

Twitter users were furious upon learning about the alleged incident and shared a large number of comments under Gorman's post, with many seconding her opinion about injustice towards the people of color. 

One tweeted, "The blacks will continue to live among the whites. The blacks are not going anywhere. Is there a way the whites will accept this reality, live with it and respect blacks? Difference is the skin colour and nothing else. We can't continue to battle this forever." Another added, "I am sorry this happened to you! Black people should be able to enter their apartments w/o looking suspicious to white people. We are NOT living in the Jim Crow era. Those days are over. It's messed that this is the modern way of them telling us we 'don't belong in their space.'" One simply wrote, "Inexcusable. Sorry. It just is."