Amanda Gorman reveals she was profiled by security guard: ‘You look suspicious’
The young famed poet tweeted: 'This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat'
Poet Amanda Gorman was apparently racially targeted by a security guard on Friday night while walking home. She revealed the incident in a series of social media posts.
“A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight. He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious,'” the 22-year-old National Youth Poet Laureate tweeted. “I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.”
Gorman is a native of Los Angeles, California.
Read More: Amanda Gorman wants to use poetry platform to enter public office one day
Several minutes after sharing what had happened to her, Gorman followed up with another tweet: “In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”
Gorman’s tweets quickly went viral and the young poet was flooded with messages of sympathy and support for what she experienced.
White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted, “Amanda Gorman’s experience is that of so many black people. Happy she made it home safely. So many others don’t.”
“Everyday Just Being Black….. will it ever change?” celebrity stylist Jason Bolden commented on Gorman’s Instagram post of the same message. Gorman replied to Bolden, writing “everyday just being that black iconic threat.”
Just days before her encounter with the unidentified security guard, Gorman shared her recent feature in People magazine, which named her among the “Women Changing the World.”
Gorman became an overnight sensation after reciting her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden‘s inauguration ceremony in January. Days after captivating audiences, Gorman was signed to IMG Models and her books — which have yet been released — became number one bestsellers on Amazon.
Read More: Amanda Gorman’s 3 books to get 1 million print orders each
Gorman is a 2020 graduate of Harvard University, where she studied sociology. Since coming into the national spotlight, Gorman’s career has continued to soar. Two weeks after her performance at the inauguration, she performed another original poem at the Super Bowl.
Since her meteoric rise, Gorman has made her intentions known that she plans to go into public office and run for president in 2036. It also doesn’t hurt she now considers political luminaries Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, and even Oprah Winfrey, as personal mentors.
“When I was at Harvard, I thought I would have to go down this kind of more orthodox path of ‘Okay, so I’ll go to law school and then maybe I’ll run for local public office,'” she told People. “Now I realized that perhaps my path will be a different one, that it might be performing my poetry and touching people that way, and then entering public office from a platform that was built off of my beliefs and thoughts and ideas.”
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