Filipino American James Juanillo marked the two-year anniversary of his viral encounter with a Karen by staging another silent chalk protest.
According to the Bay Area Reporter, the San Francisco man drew hearts, flowers and other messages of love.
Two years ago after the murder of George Floyd, Juanillo used chalk to scrawl the words Black Lives Matter outside his own apartment.
The silent protest went viral when a White couple approached him and accused him of defacing someone else’s property and telling him he didn’t belong in the ritzy Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where he had lived for 18 years.
Lisa Alexander would later issue an apology and her partner, Robert Larkin, would lose his job. The incident changed the life of Juanillo.
“I mean, like do I regret that day? Not at all,” he told the B.A.R. “All right, it changed my life. And in so many positive ways that that outweighed the unexpected sacrifice of what I considered a really well-oiled life. You know, before that actually happened, my life was on autopilot.”
San Francisco would later pass a law to criminalize racists from phoning the police and filing false charges as a weapon against victims. It would also give the harassed the right to sue their harasser.
Several cities across the country would pass similar laws.
Juanillo believes the sort of microaggression he encountered resonated with people for the simple reason they too have had similar experiences.
“It’s an experience that people are going through, these microaggressions that are hard to capture on video tape but that people of color are experiencing multiple times a day in all the arenas of their lives.”
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