In the classic book Black Like Me, white journalist John Howard Griffin writes about his experience going through everyday life living like an African American.
Wendy Ah didn’t quite go through the same transformation, but she got a dose of it nonetheless.
As part of a program called Mission Church, Ah lived in Lawndale, a largely black neighborhood in Chicago. At just age 20, she saw how officers treated people in the community differently than the way they treated her and her friends in the mostly white, Asian and Persian neighborhood she came from in San Jose, California.
“I started feeling this pain in the pit of my stomach every time I saw a cop car. They didn’t treat me or our neighbors like the police officer who gave me a break when I was 16. No, they treated us with suspicion and as if everyone in Lawndale was a criminal. This was a dehumanizing experience.”
Today she works with black students through Intervarsity’s Black Campus Ministry at UC Berkeley. The recent events in Ferguson inspired her to blog about her experiences. You can read about it in her blog WendyAh.
