Thankfully Sydney is there to stop Blacks from being fired. But the racism and harassment are constants. When one person is stopped from harming a Black person, someone else picks up the chase.

Six months or so into my employment, I was pursued by a full-back-shouldered White woman supervisor who wasn’t on my shift. She caught me flatfooted. She approached me with a generic smile. I knew it was generic because her smile didn’t make me smile. She asked me a superficial question. I winced, forced a smile on my face and answered. And it hurt me to talk to her.

A few days later she fell into my stride inside the warehouse. I smiled and said hello. Her eyes narrowed and she scowled. I took her facial expression to mean: “Nigger if you only knew what I wanted to do with you.”

She wanted to scream at me like an abusive mother; or like a cop who knew I had an abusive mother. She found an opportunity a couple of weeks later. She hid behind the girls’ bathroom door, popped out from behind it when she heard me leave the men’s restroom, and then she screamed at me for opening the wrong side of a double-door.

Now I run from her. She’s always coming. I’ve seen her frown so she’s angry because I’m running.

I’d find it hard to believe if she wasn’t gay. Gay men, however, harass me here. And there are a lot of them. Their harassment started my first day and continued to my last. First, a lanky Black man tried to charm me with talk about 90’s R&B and weekend travel. The chase was on. He’d follow me into the bathroom. I’d shit and he’d jack off in the urinals, grunting and coughing until someone walked in. He’d follow me around the plant and watch me. After a while he was gone.

I moved up to material handler, which means I transported materials to and from the warehouse with a pallet jack. There are two more material handlers, who are Hispanic. They were given new pallet jacks. I used a pallet jack that didn’t work well. I was straining while pulling pallets and my coworkers were floating their pallets. And those two guys are probably gay. They lied to a supervisor about me and I was banned from the warehouse.

Around that time, I was chased by a cochino. A Mexican man would sneak up on me and tickle my elbow while whispering into my ear. He followed me around the plant and tried talking to me in private places. I’d run. He wouldn’t stop. In hallways he’d drop something, bend to pick it up, then try to sniff my ass. After a couple of months of me running, he was gone.

One afternoon, while sitting in the break-room, a young and gay Latino started a conversation with me. I thought, this place is a haven for perverts.