This is what it's like to be black in the Midwest

Amid the national discussion about last week's police-involved shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, an online essay from a black University of Iowa alumnus is touching a chord in terms of explaining what it is like to grow up black in the Midwest.

"It's not like I'm some kind of magnet for all of the racists in America, and I'm some weird anomaly. This is what it means to be Black in America," Brian Thomas Crooks wrote Saturday in a nearly 5,000-word Facebook post that has been shared more than 1,000 times.

A native of Naperville, Ill., Crooks graduated from UI in 2007 with a degree in interdepartmental studies, focusing on entrepreneurship. He now works as a graphic designer in West Des Moines.

The post details Crooks' experiences growing up in the Chicago suburbs as the only black student in his elementary classes and as one of a few black students in high school. It also includes several examples of Crooks' experiences at UI, which he describes as "a very White campus in a very White state."

Over the past two days, Crooks has received hundreds of messages — many from his former classmates in elementary, middle school and high school who have been taking time to say, "If I ever said something to make you feel that way, or if I ever stayed silent when I should have spoken up, I offer my apologies.”

“And that really was the point of what I had written,” Crooks said in a phone interview Monday. “I felt it was important to delineate between racism and racial sensitivity.”

'Can I touch your hair?' and other racial slights

Although the examples from UI take up only a small part of Crooks' essay, they resonate with the experiences reported more recently by students of color at all three of Iowa's predominately white public universities — including having strangers repeatedly ask to touch his hair, to be followed by employees in stores, to being pulled over by police repeatedly for questionable offenses.

While studying at UI, Crooks said most of his fellow students from small-town Iowa "were really excited to finally meet a Black person," but there were plenty of occasions — especially in the downtown bars — when complete strangers would hurl racial slurs at him.

Crooks said he attended every home football game while studying at UI, but he didn't start drinking at all until his senior year. In November 2006, however, he said found himself in the drunk tank in Kinnick Stadium — even though he had not been drinking much — after a campus police officer mistakenly assumed Crooks was picking a fight with a drunken man who had fallen against him while standing in line.

"Everyone else in there was either screaming, puking, or passed out," Crooks wrote. "The guy who fell into me was allowed to go into the game. The charges against me were dropped when the lady who kept an eye on the drunk tank spoke on my behalf when I had to go see the judge."

MORE: 

• Iowa's black college students: We don't feel welcome
• 4 students' stories: Feeling racism on campus
• Black Iowa — Still Unequal? series

In the post, Crooks provided several examples of white people he knew well — whether childhood friends, college ex-girlfriends or professional colleagues — who suddenly would turn on him and make explicitly racist comments.

"People can be totally cool for years and years but suddenly decide that they need to be super racist because they want to hurt you," Crooks wrote. "They'll say they're sorry, they'll explain how you misinterpreted what they said, but the fact is, they reach for racism because they think it'll emotionally and psychologically destroy you, and that's what they want to do at that moment."

Crooks also discussed the the near complete absence of black authority figures in his life — whether bosses, coaches, teachers, doctors, dentists or police officers who have pulled him over.

"In 31 years, I've seen three Black people in a position of authority," Crooks wrote. "Think about what that does to the psyche of a growing young man. I remember being excited just a few years ago when we started to see Black people in commercials without there being gospel or hip-hop music in the background."

Saturday's Facebook essay had a similar message to the hundreds of messages that Crooks said he has been posting in recent years about the reality of living as a black man in a majority white area.

Many of those posts consisted of sharing links of police-involved shootings or other racial disparities and adding the following bitterly ironic sentence: "Just the another isolated incident that is in no way indicative of or related to a societal problem."

When he decided to tell his own story and connect some of the so-called "isolated incidents" from his own life, Crooks said he never dreamed that so many people would be willing to spend 10 or 15 minutes reading through everything he had to write.

"I never watch a video online that's longer than three minutes," he said.

Crooks explained in his post that he isn't looking for sympathy for himself. He, instead, is trying to spark empathy and understanding in his readers.

"If you read all this, I really, really want to say thank you," Crooks concluded. "I know it was a lot to get through. But this is real. This is me. This is what my life is and has been. And I'm not alone."

See the complete Facebook post here.

Reach Jeff Charis-Carlson at jcharisc@press-citizen.com or 319-887-5435. Follow him on Twitter at @jeffcharis.