I feel ashamed when Black people unconsciously make me feel nervous. I walked into Wing Stop to pick up my order of chicken wings. I stood at the register waiting to be served. To my right, a Black male who seem to be around my age wore long dreads, baggy clothes, and smelled like weed. He walked to the counter next to me with his sagging swag walk. I imagined the young man pulling out a gun and robbing the restaurant just because he looked like a thug and smelled like marijuana.
As a young Black man I should have more faith in other young Black men, right? If a white man walked into the store with baggy clothes and smelled like marijuana, I would assume he’s a hippy.
American media has brainwashed us to believe every Black male who wears baggy clothes is dangerous. But, no one pays attention to young white people with unnatural hair colors given the fact that a young white male killed twelve people in a movie theater, and he dyed his hair bright orange to impersonate The Joker. Even so, all white men with unnatural hair colors are not stereotyped as criminals.
Most of the time white male weed-heads are portrayed as partying college boys, hippies, or lazy mama’s boys. Most media appearances of Black men smoking weed are in violent rap videos, violent movies, and other violent advertisements. The only nonviolent media I know of Black men smoking marijuana are Jamaican and reggae portrayals.
There is no high rate of crime being committed due to the effects of marijuana, so, me being nervous should have had nothing to do with the person being Black. But, it did, and that is a problem with me and my society.
ArmstrongTimes 
I loved the personal honesty in this, but it isn’t all true. As a Jamaican I can tell you that people dressed like thugs and smelling like weed are treated as criminals in Jamaica.
We are scared of them too and with good reason. They’re usually the ones in shootings and calmly sitting in the back of police cars with no remorse on their face. It paints a bad picture, even though we don’t have the racial tension America has here.
As for the belief that rockers (people with dyed hair and heavy make up) and hippies aren’t discriminated against. That too is false. Their treatment as criminals certainly differs from that of thuggish African Americans but it’s just two sides of the same coin. They are seen as trouble makers and thieves, and involved in protests of their own, though not usually the perpetrators of violent crime.
I hung out with a lot of those as a teen and was (and still is) one myself. In fact, so is my mother-in-law, her daughter, and at one point, her son whom I married.
We all face some kind of discrimination in life, but some definitely comes in worse forms than others.
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