Why I Always Bring My ID With Me–Even When I Take Out the Garbage
I always carry my ID. It’s a survival skill. Even if I go for a quick walk around the block in my quiet Canadian neighbourhood. Or, sometimes, when I’m just taking out the garbage. Why? Because I’m Black. I’m an immigrant. I’m scared. Perhaps traumatized.
I was born at the end of Brazil’s dictatorship, and I grew up in abject poverty in one of São Paulo’s many favelas. Growing up in an environment with criminality and prejudice against Black people, I learned from an early age I could vanish in an instant and not be found alive again. If the Police stopped and questioned me, it was just assumed I was a criminal.
It could be as simple as carrying an umbrella on your walk home from school, and it gets mistaken for an automatic weapon. And boom… This has been the unfortunate fate for several school-aged children. More than once. And it still happens. Black kids are being murdered daily in Brazil. It doesn’t matter what age we are. We still get killed.
It is terrifying when you’re stopped by the Police arriving home late at night. We fear them. We know we could easily die if we say anything wrong. Even when we were just living our daily lives. For the Police, we were all the same: criminals until proven otherwise.
According to the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety (FBSP), a Brazilian not-for-profit that looks to find solutions to improve public safety in the country, just over 57,000 Brazilians were murdered in 2018. And 75% of those deaths were Black people. Yes, you read that right. Data from the same source showed that the Military Police across the country killed 17 Brazilians citizens a day that same year.
But we didn’t get here overnight. This is a product of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. About five million enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil from the early 1500s until slavery was abolished in 1888. Brazil took more slaves than any other country in the Americas, and was the last to abolish it. The reality of Brazil today impacts a lot of people. Brazil has more than 210 million people, and over half of that population self-identify as Black or mixed race.
So this goes back to my first point: Why am I always carrying my ID even if I am only going for a quick walk around the block? First, I’m not a Canadian citizen. Secondly, I am a Black man and I know that we aren’t all the same. In Canada, I’m less scared of getting stopped and questioned by the police than I would be at home in Brazil, but there’s still something inside me that says ‘don’t take the chance’. Some people might think I’m paranoid. But maybe they’ve never had to think about what would happen to them if they got asked for ID.
