Valerie Dickson’s son was sitting in his car in front of his family home playing Pokémon Go when, she said, a White woman driving through the neighborhood stopped to take photos of him and his car, threatening to call the cops for “making her uncomfortable.”
Dickson’s son, who was 20 years old at the time, told his mother, “She says I don’t belong here,” as he ran back into their home of eight years.
“I told her, you’re going to call the cops and the best case scenario is the cops are going to come out and they’re going to ask my son a lot of questions and make him feel uncomfortable. The worst case scenario is I end up being another Black mother on the news because my son has been shot,” Dickson said. “And somewhere in between, he gets arrested or pulled into the police department and I have to go down and defend his right to play Pokémon Go. Defend his right to just be a Black nerd.”
Since that 2018 incident, the family has moved out of Orange County so Valerie Dickson said she now feels more comfortable describing the experience – and incidents of hate against the Black community continue to be among the most reported. Last year, the Black community was the most targeted population in Orange County when it comes to hate crimes and incidents, according to the 2022 Hate Crimes Report that will be released today, Sept. 21, by the Orange County Human Relations Commission.
In 2022, Black residents made up 2% of Orange County’s population, however, they made up 52% of reported hate crimes and 43% of hate incidents – an incident is considered action motivated by hateful bias that is not a crime.
“Watching my 20-year-old son cry and apologize because he was trying to catch Pikachu. Because he was trying to sit there and be a kid as long as he could be. For him to be threatened with the cops was hard,” Dickson said. “My son never played Pokémon Go in front of our house again. He stopped. He would get in and out of his car as…
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