Just to give people a sense of who Christian Cooper, the man put at risk for asking a white woman to follow leash laws is. He used to edit comics for Marvel and now is an editor for biomedical publications. He went to Harvard. None of it mattered to the woman who threatened him. https://twitter.com/vaultausir/status/1265325766293819393

Despite all his academic and professional accomplishments the white person deploying the “I’m telling the police an *African-American Male* is threatening me” lie knows nothing other than that description will matter.

Christian Cooper isn’t a teenager (or a child since Black children are also seen as threats) with no professional standing, but he might as well have been. This is why I look sideways at people who think all that matters in America is surface signifiers of class.

Class is vitally important to understanding how this country works but if you don’t understand how it intersects with race in the backbone of how white Americans understand class hierarchy then you haven’t done the work and aren’t ready to lead any kind of mass movement.