The following article by column Connie Schultz was posted on the creators.com website June 27, 2018:
Before I sat down to write this column about what it means to be civil in today’s political climate, I took my dog for a walk through our neighborhood.
We live in the largest development built in the city of Cleveland since World War II. It’s diverse, racially and economically, and home to many LGBTQ families, too. On most days, you can’t walk half a block without talking to a neighbor. This morning, that neighbor was Kenn Johnson, who shared a recent story about what it’s like to be a 56-year-old black man shopping in a drugstore in today’s America.
Johnson has his master’s in psychology and has spent much of his career supervising those who work with people with disabilities. More recently, he has started his own consulting business, and he’s also a political organizer.
He uses a skin product that is available, in our neighborhood, at only two drugstores of the same chain. At one of those stores, he was scanning the shelves in the cosmetics aisle, when a voice on the loudspeaker announced, “Customer needs assistance in the cosmetics aisle.”