A black lawmaker was canvassing door to door in her district. A constituent called 911.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/07/05/a-black-lawmaker-was-campaigning-door-to-door-in-her-district-a-constituent-called-911/?utm_term=.827c29dfb066



State Rep. Janelle Bynum, an Oregon Democrat, was talking to constituents, typing notes on her cellphone as she knocked on doors in her district just outside Portland.

Then a sheriff’s deputy pulled up.

Bynum — who is black — said a resident in the Clackamas County neighborhood where she was canvassing had called the police on Tuesday, thinking she was “suspicious” because she was going door to door and “spending a lot of time typing on her cellphone after each house.”

“Live from the mean streets of Clackamas!!!” she wrote in a Facebook post recounting the incident, which the Root summarized in hashtag form: #CampaigningWhileBlack.

In recent months, black people have found themselves the subjects of 911 calls over mundane and innocuous activities, like napping. Or in Bynum’s case, for doing her job. Such false-alarm emergency calls over nonemergency incidents, some of which have been captured on video, have raised questions about whether people were calling the police not because of what someone was doing, but because of the person’s race.

Hence, #LivingWhileBlack and its variations, #[insert action word here]WhileBlack, were born.