DON'T STAND OUT!!!

It was my fortieth birthday, a time to reflect. I had been a police officer and detective for over fourteen years. In the last year, a friend and fellow officer had been killed, and most recently, my mother had passed away.

From the time I was a little boy, I prepared to be a good American. I joined the Cub Scouts and later the Boy Scouts. I then followed my four older brothers into the United States Marine Corps where I spent over six years.

I was a sergeant when I received my medical discharge. After over a year working for the U.S. Customs Service in an entry level position as well as doing some very hard work to recover from my military career-ending injury, I recovered, became, and remained a police officer. I also hold a fourth degree black belt in TaeKwonDo.

The above mentioned friend and I studied martial arts at the same school. At times I would give him personal advice about the arts and he also liked to hear about some of my exploits as an undercover narcotics officer. He had had about three years on the department and had recently been transferred to the narcotics section as an undercover agent. He took pride in his abilities as a cop and his physical abilities as well.

I used to think that he absorbed TaeKwonDo a little too easily and discovered later that he had been a contemporary dancer. He used to tell me that he would achieve his black belt in less time than it took most. I believed him because of his commitment and dedication to practice. When something was difficult for him, he just worked that much harder.

We worked on the same floor in the East Precinct of the Seattle Police Department. He used to come to my desk over in the juvenile section after lunch almost daily and quiz me. I liked his enthusiasm and his questions kept me on my toes.

On the other hand, my mother was my connection to the "Great Spirit." She was a very religious woman and incredibly spiritual. From her, I learned that there is a big difference between the two. She had raised me to be a good boy and ensured that I went to church every Sunday while growing up. I was even a Sunday school teacher. She watched as I grew spiritually and she seemed to know that I was seeking my own way in this life. She was there for me and I know I broadened her senses with some of my discoveries.

My mother didn't talk much about herself. I discovered that she had had a hard life, but a satisfying one. My mother was part white, part Cherokee, and part black. My great-grandmother was white. My grandfather was Cherokee Indian. My mother and all of her siblings looked like proud tall Native Americans and I always wanted to know more about the Cherokee side of the family.

I remember when I transitioned into Al-Islam my mother was so worried that I was going to become an enemy of the white man and that I was going to follow the honorable minister Louis Farrakhan to the ends of the Earth. As she lived in North Carolina and I lived in Seattle, we would speak on the phone regularly -- not regularly enough for her, I might add. So during one of these conversations about life, she made one of her comments about the minister. I decided to carefully address her knowledge of him.

I asked what she knew about him other than what the media had told her. After she got over her defensiveness, she understood that I was not challenging her, but asking her to open up her mind. I asked her to listen to the minister's weekly broadcast that week and we could talk about it afterward.

Well, she phoned me after she had listened to him and she was so proud. She was proud of me for looking outside what had been pushed at me all those years and discovering that I was on the road to finding myself. She was proud of the minister for being so eloquent, educated, articulate, commanding, beautiful and black. She had only known black leaders to be like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Don't misunderstand, we both loved him, but a black man who would confront society with no fear, just "truth," was something new.