Life

I feel the need to comment on the recent incident involving Jussie Smollett, not because I know him or have any inside knowledge of the case, but because of its uncanny resemblance to my own experiences thirteen years ago.

As my friends and family already know, I was physically assaulted in the winter of 2006, in what I still believe to have been an attempt upon my life, though the police categorized it only as strong-armed robbery. The assailants surrounded me as I left a coffee shop shortly after dusk, and shouted racial slurs as they viciously attacked without provocation. They all had brown skin, though they wore head coverings, which prevented me from ascertaining their exact race. From their accents I assumed they were African-American, but they could also have been Indian, Muslim, African, or Southeast Asian. I to this day simply do not know.

It was a different time all those years ago. No one really cared what happened to black men, so there was no motive to orchestrate one's own assault. If anything, there was reason to cover up such incidents, lest people think you were part of a street gang yourself, and that you deserved what had happened to you. That combined with the fact that I was a young man with no money or fame, meant that my status as a victim was never really in doubt.

Nevertheless, I found myself in handcuffs less than a week after the crime took place. I had sustained a severe blow to the head from the attack, and at my family's urging, I had been taken to the emergency room, where doctors ran MRIs, CAT scans, and a whole host of other tests in an attempt to figure out whether or not I had a brain injury. There were no available beds, and after several hours I just wanted to leave and go home. I became slightly agitated, and had a brief argument with one of the assistants tending to me. The doctors retaliated by declaring me non-compliant and committing me to the local ward. The police arrested me and quietly escorted me to the hospital's dungeon for a night, before finally transferring me in a squad car to another hospital, where I was given a bed on 24/7 lock-down.

That was how I spent the next four weeks. The doctors tended to my wounds, evaluated my mental state, and finally declared me healthy enough to be released back into the world. My expensive insurance plan covered very little, so I spent the next four to five years wrestling with crippling medical debt, as I tried to piece my life back together.

Having journeyed through hell all those years ago, it has pained me to see history repeating itself for so many other young men and women in our society. At the same time, I'm also angered by the possibility that an elaborate hoax may have made a mockery of what I and so many other survivors of violence have been through.

But given my own memories of completely preposterous treatment at the hands of both police and medical staff, I find myself unwilling to discount even the least believable of stories. So I will likely be Mr Smollett's last ally, and the last to abandon him.