One morning I was waiting for my breakfast order at Royal Farms off of Route 175, Howard County, Maryland. I walked over to the far end of the hot food counter to get some napkins. Afterwards, I remained standing to the right of the computer food order kiosks. When I looked up, I noticed one of the food preparers looking at the store space behind me. Something told me to turn around when I saw a black “Christian” male quickly headed towards me and was about to grab me. But once he saw me turn around he stopped whatever he had intended to do and walked to another part of the store. If I had not noticed the food preparer in a sense watching over me, I would have been accosted by this black male. I cannot even get a breakfast sandwich in a suburb without a black male plotting to assault me.
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blackmanleaveusalone 
Dear Gen X and Y black women, Muslim women and women of color caught up in the harassment-stalking plight:
Thank you for creating this wonderful blogspot in WordPress. You – and all decent Muslim and Christian black women of color and character here and abroad – are a Godsend!!! You are an indispensable asset to your private homes, your faith communities, schools, workplaces and all of the public spaces in between. Without you – single or married – the fabrics of your societies just wouldn’t be.
I greet you as a black Catholic Haitian-American woman and 40ish elder member of Generation X. I thought I was the only crazy one in both in Chicago, Illinois and the greater Washington, D.C. area caught in the stalking campaign by black male brutes/pigs/animals. Please allow me to explain:
I am having a similar problem here in the Midwest as you are having in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, central Maryland, northern Virginia, the East Coast in general, California and the West Coast in general – except with a substantial twist. Again, let me explain.
As a Chicagoan who grew up and lived in Chicago for 30 years, I lived in the greater D.C. area for 12 years as a print journalist. I enjoyed it but I left D.C. to return to Chicago precisely in large part because of the stalking issue you described in these pages.
Permit me to comment that I regret to read on these pages as of December 2014 that the standard of living in the greater Washington, D.C. area has since deteriorated from the time I left in June 2010. Mortified by their behavior over the past four years of my absence, I apologize to you all on behalf of all the thugs and hooligans that have ever attempted to make your lives miserable in D.C. proper, Baltimore, central Maryland and northern Virginia.
It was not always been this way as you have been describing since 2012. When I first came to the greater D.C. area in 1998, it was safe. You never saw low-to-moderate income, questionable generation X and Y black males loitering in the area and harassing or stalking women because the more reasonable, more conscientious members of the Jones, Baby Boom and Silent generations of adults of all races dominated the scene.
However, by May 2004, I actually that the greater D.C. area was infested with this working-class, shiftless, criminal black males in their 20s and 30s because this generational cohort came of age right then and there.
At this same time, other forces were at work. It was the new millennium and the Great Recession, the high unemployment rate, mass company and factory layoffs, great national banking scandals (i.e., CitiGroup and J.P. Morgan Chase) and the housing foreclosure crisis had already taken hold then. By 2002, about 2 percent of the middle class around the country had fallen out of that social category as a result of the economic downturn. We are still reeling from its effects in December 2014.
All of the aforementioned caused the proliferation of poor-to-working-class Gen X and Gen Y black males all over the greater Washington, D.C. area – including Baltimore, central Maryland and northern Virginia by May 2004. At that very time, I began to notice a decrease in the quality of life in D.C.
When I saw these black male thugs and hooligans in the area, jobs were hard to get, all the public spaces were becoming less and less safe and secure, including the libraries, trains and buses, and consumer goods were more expensive. Even the Metro (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority [WMATA]) system – the envy of the nation and better than the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) system – was plunging in quality. (Do you remember the train crash of June 2009?)
A combination of all of these factors – including the wide presence of black male thugs – caused me to leave the area June 22, 2010. By then, I had already been harassed and stalked in the buses, trains and all the public spaces of Olney, Md.; Silver Spring, Md.; Wheaton, Md.; Arlington, Va.; Alexandria, Va.; and McLean, Va.
The difference between my experience is that I was not always an object of desire and other very serious factors were at work. When I was, men made lurid anatomical references, showed their private parts, groped themselves and hurled insults.
When I was not, however, many of the thugs were hostile and antagonistic toward me – to make up for the much more attractive, younger women in their 20s and 30s who spurned their advances. When I was not, I was scapegoated for their collective rejection by Generation X and Generation Y black women because I was not middle class or beautiful like them. They found it easy and convenient to dump on me psychologically because of my working-class origins.
The most egregious case was in Olney, Maryland – one of the most exclusively wealthy neighborhoods in the whole of Maryland, especially tony Montgomery County. My stalking experience was due in large part to the fact that I lived in a Haitian family private home in Olney I otherwise could not afford and aroused the suspicion and bias of the white wealthy homeowners there who somehow worked with the local police to encourage these black male thugs to harass and stalk me between May 2004 and March 2007. During that period, I was temping in various office jobs and cobbling together a living as technical proposal writer, grant writer and freelance writer.
Egged on by the police and the rich homeowners, the thugs were angry that I rejected their advances and went out of their way to make me feel frightened and intimidated during my comings and goings to work, Catholic parish, the libraries and other public spaces. If I could afford to own a car back then, I would have avoided the thugs outright.
When I got to Chicago in June 2010 to develop my freelance writing practice, all was calm and peace. I did not see a mass manifestation of criminal black males right away.
In fact, I did not see the Roman legion of black male savages roam the Chicago city and suburban landscape until the national economic crisis in Chicago, Cook County where I live and the state of Illinois in general began to materialize in the form of 10 percent unemployment in Chicago; 9 percent unemployment in the state of Illinois (population, 12 million); Chicago mass layoffs of such factories and companies as the Hostess Cupcake manufacturing and corporate outlets, the Chicago public schools (1,500 teachers and 50 schools shut down), Sears, GE Zenith Controls, Sealy Mattress, IBM and Benedictine University between 2011 and 2013; a $160 million cut in the budget of the Chicago police department in fiscal years 2012 and 2013 and the $100-plus billion Illinois public pension scandal caused by politicians stealing from its coffers for 30-plus years.
My first nasty encounter came Sunday, June 2, 2013 when a light-skinned thug in his mid-20s to early 30s threw hostile, antagonistic looks in my direction as I neared a bus stop to catch a bus to attend Sunday Mass.
I swear on a tall stack of Catholic Bibles that I never met or knew the man in my whole life. He had no reason to be antagonistic or hostile toward me as I never wronged him.
What happened was this: because of the rampant joblessness, corruption of Chicago politics, budget cuts to the Chicago police department and shut down of public schools and other services due to the ballooning pension scandal, the thugs were turning to drug dealing and gang activity to either supplement their incomes or to reject honest labor outright. (There is a 21 percent unemployment rate in my low-to-moderate income Chicago West Side neighborhood of Austin/Galewood, at least 150 foreclosures under Bank of America and a high prison parolee population.)
Aside from his gangstalking behavior, I was surprised by the man’s appearance. He was the best-dressed person I ever saw in the area. Only late middle-aged or elderly working-class black women attending Protestant church services in the area dressed in their feminine Sunday best or for family-related events.
By contrast, regardless of age or generation, most of the residents west of the area of Austin and North avenues, especially along Austin Boulevard on the very outskirts of Chicago — before you reach Galewood and the near western suburbs of Oak Park, Elmwood Park, River Forest, River Grove, Forest Park, Norridge, Norwood Park and Harwood Heights — are black and working-class, if not outright poor.
They live in bungalows, rowhouses, two-flat apartment buildings and Georgian homes in the Austin/Galewood area from Austin to Springfield on the western and eastern borders respectively and from Grand Avenue to Jackson Boulevard on the northern and southern borders.
Aside from receiving welfare and disability SSI benefits and food stamps in the form of the Linkcard, they may work one to three jobs to feed, clothe and house their families, paying off mortgages and car notes. I will admit that I am not clear as to exactly how most of the law-abiding black working-class support themselves but I am sure that they are working.
During traditional business work hours throughout the work-week, I hardly see any of them on the street unless they are going to or from work, school, the hospital or running an important errand. And they give the appearance of being engaged with the community because they go about their daily routines in a non-threatening manner and converse with neighbors or others in the area.
And, unlike the first perpetrator of my gangstalking encounter, they are not well-dressed. They are always very plainly dressed from whatever they can afford in the way of light athletic wear, denim, cheap black gym shoes or work shoes or boots.
My gangstalking criminal was the polar opposite of the black working-class or poor I see when I leave my home with my elderly parents, the rightful owners.
My stalker, by all appearances, was a lone wolf. He did not act like community. He was well-dressed and did not seem attached to the residents in the area and I never saw him going about simple homeowner or resident routines such as mowing or watering the lawn, disposing of garbage, retrieving groceries from a car or casually chatting with a next-door neighbor.
He simply did not give off that down-and-out homeowner or resident aura. This made me highly suspicious of him.
After I saw him, I reported his actions to the police that day. I did not understand why I was being targeted other than I happened to be a chronic pedestrian — as I do not own a car — in a sea of hardscrabble homeowners.
And I had been actively job-hunting in the local libraries in and outside my neighborhood in the past four years in between bouts of gainful employment. Perhaps, the stalker had been tracking my moves since then.
What made my first encounter strange was that this happened two weeks after I completed a three-month job of scoring state standardized tests for middle school grades from late March 2013 to late May 2013. By early June, I was pounding the pavement in an active job search at the local libraries.
I began to guess that the stalker may have been angry because, every spring, the homeowners of Galewood — my area — are engaged in active community policing to ask local beat police officers at community policing meetings to keep gangs and drugs out of the nearby Amundsen Park district.
The area is a city playground area and fieldhouse where we have had such activity since June 1992 when my parents, my siblings and I first moved here.
Perhaps, the stalker thought I was active in community policing when I was not. But I did not begin community policing at all by phone, e-mail, regular snail mail and via community policing meetings until after June 2013 when I was first gangstalked.
I say “first gangstalked” because I was to see this same individual two more times.
The next time I saw him was in February 2014 on a cold, overcast, snowy weekday right outside of my second gangstalker — a dark-skinned black male in his 20s or 30s who timed his appearances to match my own at the bus stop where I catch the bus to Mass. He would kneel before his lawn, smoke his cigarette and walk back in when my bus arrived, sometimes glaring at me the entire time. I first saw the second stalker for this encounter July 2013 — a full month after I saw the first light-skinned stalker.
Up until February 2014 — when I saw the first gangstalker visit and talk with the second gangstalker, I only suspected but was not absolutely clear that the two were working together. February 2014 was months after I was being stalked, shadowed and intimidated by a series of black male stalkers.
All of the black male stalkers were lone wolves drifting from black working-class and poor neighborhoods east of my Austin/Galewood area. All of my stalkers were slim black males and in their 20s or 30s until later — when I called the police in May 2014 about a CTA patron I took to be a late middle-aged pimp exploiting a teen-aged girl — those in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
Mostly, the male stalkers of the age 18 to 44, generations X and Y cohort followed me no matter where I went — the local libraries, the local Catholic parish, the grocery stores, drug stores, shopping malls, parks, work-related events and all public spaces in between, I confirmed that the two first male stalkers were acting together to start a gangstalking campaign against me.
I later surmised that the campaign was meant to psychologically and socially condition the Austin/Galewood area — and the entire Chicago West Side — for intense drug and gang activity on the same horrific scale as that high publicized in Chicago’s black working-class and poor South Side.
Aside from the two nasty encounters June 2013 and February 2014, I saw the original gangstalker two weeks after my second sighting of him. This was the end of February — a particularly cold day when I was taking a suburban Metra train — not the local Chicago CTA bus and train system – to attend a job orientation in Chicago’s western suburban Naperville.
As was characteristic of all of the assorted black males — all of whom I suspected to be cultish, block-obsessed gang members and drug dealers in the Austin/Galewood area, if not the other Chicago West Side neighborhoods such as Douglas Park, Washington Park, Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, Logan Square, Hanson Park, and possibly Belmont-Cragin north of my area — they all mocked my daily routines with each encounter no matter where I traveled by bus or train whether I was going to work or going to Mass or running an errand.
If I had a shopping bag, on their next planned encounter of me, they would be sure to have one. If I was going to a bank, on the next encounter, they made sure they were visiting one in my presence. They would ride the trains and buses with me. They would track my routines closely and phone their peers by cell phone about my comings and goings to mock, humiliate and intimidate me all along my trajectory.
It reached a hiatus where I dreaded going out, no matter how necessary the trips I took. I e-mailed, phoned and wrote the police regularly between June 2013 and beyond February 2014 and attended community policing meetings, starting in late March 2014.
Again, up until then, I was not periodically taking part in such activity before June 2013. What did the gangs and drug dealers have to fear in me?
On one level, I suspected that the gang members and drug dealers are wholly responsible for the campaign of terror I have experienced from June 2013 up to the present. After all, I learned overtime with my interactions with police, that the gang and drug dealers not only want the bus stops along North Avenue and other such streets to perform their transactions but they also want a particular bus stop at Austin and Bloomingdale avenues. In early 2014, in late winter, I once witnessed an open-air drug transaction at that bus stop with which a rolled-up dollar bill changed hands with the involvement of a black luxury car.
Police were contacted and a series of arrests flowed from that in the area.
This stop is officially banned for criminal activity by the Chicago police since 2010. Despite the ban, the area gang members and drug dealers were defiantly fighting to regain control of the stop — the very one in which I was gangstalked repeatedly when I traveled anywhere.
The gangstalking against me was stepped up as a result. In fact, whenever there was an arresting binge, I was always aggressively stalked and shadowed.
At the same time, I had been helping a white male elderly military veteran west of me in Galewood with his bitter condominium association problems since March 2012. His condo neighbors and any person of stature associated with the condo association was stalking and harassing him in the same manner as I was being followed and tracked.
What seemed at the time to be my worst two encounters of the entire gangstalking campaign peaked in June 2013 and October 2013. My veteran friend and I were in the midst of a human rights investigation with the Illinois Department of Human Rights against members of his condo association and the police were accused of not prosecuting their actions. Thus, June 2013 was the time that I encountered my first gangstalker and the campaign against me began. The other critical time — October 2013 — represented the completion of the investigation by the Illinois Department of Human Rights. My friend and I lost the case but that is when the gangstalkers stepped up their shadowing, mockery and humiliation of me. They did so even more in December 2013 after my friend and I attempted to take his stalkers to domestic violence court for a charge of harassment and stalking. We lost those cases as well. In February 2014, another court case involving a slapping incident perpetrated by one of his neighbors, too, was lost by him. And it was in that month that I met my second gangstalker for the second time talking with my first gangstalker.
In June, October, December 2013 and February 2014, I suspected the condo association’s complicity in my gangstalking and even police, however, I cannot prove it.
In reading the material on a gangstalking website, I am realizing the typical gangstalking behavior described on thosepages matched my experiences exactly: my perpetrators had a lot at stake in intimidating and controlling me, a possibly threat to them, but they could not afford to physically or seriously harm me as they would face substantial reprisal or grave consequences from law enforcement. And I was being sensitized with mockery of my day-to-day routine and high-beam cars honking or parking in the windows of my home at night.
So, instead as the text of the gangstalking website points out, they had to resort to the more convenient route of gangstalking to keep me at bay. As the site points out, the police cannot prosecute and my parents, relatives and neighbors started to think I was crazy when I related these events to them until they heard the noise and mayhem outside their home in Amundsen Park district late at night.
Additionally, as the website states, the gangstalking against me is a hate crime. I am most assuredly, hated by the gang members and drug dealers — and possibly the condo association — for the threat of my community policing, constant e-mails, letters and phone calls to police and government authorities, my outdoor presence on foot, my limited success at my job hunt and my respectable affiliations.
And, while numerous arrests were made by police in the past year and the nonexistent serious leadership for gangs dismantled 25 years ago by law enforcement efforts in Chicago put a damper on the gangstalking campaign against me, I still see thugs on the buses, trains and other public spaces.
These who have not been accosted by police yet feel free to stalk and follow me and have stepped up their surveillance and campaign to all of the public spaces I occupy with my friends and family.
As a result, I need your advice as to how to address and cope with the gangstalking I face. I have called and e-mailed police since I still see and hear the criminals in my neighborhood. I’ve contacted government agencies and even tried legal aid societies but have not gotten assistance. I cannot afford a private attorney. Even an attempt at domestic violence court on my own part yielded no results as I don’t know any of the names of the hundreds of criminals who have stalked me or their names. In Chicago, you need actual names to file a $250 legal complaint of harassment and stalking in court.
Any advice you may provide as to my rights as a gangstalking victim and my best course of action — with all of the details I have laid out before you — would be welcome.
I am White and have had to face this sort of thing.