I was appalled. I was the kind of appalled where your jaw drops open, you shake your head, you gasp and gasp, but it just isn’t enough to express how you feel. I was trying to cross the street to grab a low-fat, delicious toasted sub at Subway with my black friend, Pierre. We waited for the signal to indicate when it was safe to cross, but what we saw instead was a blatant show of ignorance. A symbol of a white stickman appeared. A WHITE stickman! Haven’t we moved beyond this? I told Pierre we’d wait for another sign, another more inclusive one, but it never came. The sign went from white man, to flashing red hand, to solid red hand, and back again. Never once did it say it was okay for black folks or Hispanics or women to cross. That’s especially cruel because the white man is usually driving around in his fancy car while the minorities are stuck walking.

I boycotted that corner and bought my sandwich elsewhere. I thought the ugliness was over. One racist road sign will go away all by itself, I’d hoped. But it was not alone. While I was driving through a poor neighborhood, I saw another travesty. It was a diamond-shaped yellow sign with a painting of two black stick-children. Were they trying to say watch out for black kids crossing in the same way you would some deer? Are they comparing blacks to animals? Are they saying that they’re too dumb to cross the street safely? Terrible! Shame on the city!

I was flustered. I pulled over and went into a local liquor store. I was going to buy some Wild Turkey to try to forget the injustices of the world. But first I had to pee. The man behind the counter pointed me in the direction of the restrooms. And when I was about to push the door open and do my business, I noticed that above the word “Men” was a picture of a white stickman. I wanted to scream. So I did, like a mouse getting turned into a smoothie.

I ran up to the man behind the counter (who was black) and shouted, “They won’t even let you into the bathroom!?! This is ludicrous!” He didn’t seem to mind that much. He did mind the volume of my voice and asked me to leave. There was no reason to get mad at me; I didn’t prevent him from going number one or crossing the street.

This was all way insane. We are in the 21st century now. The civil rights movement came and went. Dr. King had a dream and then they shot him. And for what? For no progress whatsoever? Damn!

Somebody had to do something about this. I tore the white man and the white woman off the bathroom signs. The guy in the store chased me out, that Uncle Tommin’ fool. I did the same at a local Wendy’s. The owner wanted to thank me, but I slipped out just before he got a chance to do so. This isn’t about rewards and kudos, you see; it is about justice.

So I grabbed me some paints and got to work. I painted every discriminatory sign I could find. If it was a white man I painted a black woman next to him. If it was a pair of black children, I’d paint a Native American senior citizen. I figured that ought to shake things up. We can’t sit around and take this hatred and divisiveness. Because all people, of all colors and creeds and cultures, should be able to go into the restroom and get from one street corner to another. Because we should all have the same rights even if some of us are inferior.