We have another hashtag.
#SummerJobWhileBlack is gaining popularity on Twitter after an 11-year-old boy had the police called on him for delivering newspapers in Ohio. As WABC TV reports, Brandie Sharp had taken her two sons, Mycah, 17, and Uriah, 11, to deliver newspaper ads to a neighborhood in Upper Arlington, Ohio. Sharp said the point was “teaching them how to work, how to be productive and how to stay busy.”
At one point, Uriah, the youngest, had to backtrack having delivered to the wrong houses and retrieve a few newspapers to put them on the correct porches.
Then, a police officer showed up, and asked what they were doing. Someone had called Upper Arlington police.
“It looked like at first they were delivering newspapers or something, but I noticed they were walking up to the houses with nothing in hand and one of them came back with something,” said the caller to Upper Arlington Police, “I mean, I don’t want to say something was going on, but it just but it just seemed kind of suspicious.”
Brandie Sharp showed the officer the big bag of ads. “He said, ‘Oh, really?’ and by that time I was kind of like, ‘Okay, why are you questioning me about this?’ Sharp told WABC TV. “What was suspicious at 5:30 in the evening? What was this big, you know, reasoning that you had to call the police?”
Officer Bryan McKean, speaking on behalf of Upper Arlington Police, told WABC TV, “We sent an officer out to take a look at it. When our officer arrived on scene, he very quickly determined very quickly that these individuals were delivering the newspaper.”
Soon after the incident, the Internet was trending with another hashtag – #SummerJobWhileBlack. White people have made headlines already this year for harassing black people and people of color for going to the pool, selling bottles of water, grilling out, wearing shirts celebrating heritages, walking their dogs, and much more.
