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When I was 6-years-old, the KKK held a rally in my home town.
Because of the rally, my parents were worried that the Klan might target our family. Their major concern, because the Klan hates Black people, was that Klansmen would drive by and see my sister and I playing in the front lawn, and nothing says, "Hey! A Black family lives at this exact address!" like two Black kids playing in the yard.
My parents tried their best to explain to my little sister and I that there are men in this world who might hurt us because of what we look like, and for the sake of our safety, they asked us to stay inside until the rally was over and the Klan left town.
We should've taken our parent's words more seriously, but the thing is, my sister and I are children of the 90s, which means that we grew up at a time in American history when there were an abundance of movies about kids fending off home invaders with booby traps. So instead of playing it safe while being babysat by our grandma, my little sister and I snuck away and hatched a plan.
My sister was four years old and really into the idea of making magic potions, so she took a few empty water balloons and filled them with dish soap, mud, glitter, and few dashes of Lawry's Seasoned Salt. She then mumbled a bunch of childish gibberish while waving her hands in the air and assured me that she had recited an ancient incantation that had transformed her potion-filled water balloons into smoke bombs that would only go off in the presence of racists.
I should've guessed it wouldn't work, since we all know that ancient civilizations didn't have the advanced technology necessary to make Lawry's Seasoned Salt. But at the time, it seemed legit.
Then, we went up to the attic and got all of our dad's old, shoddy stereo equipment. He always had a bunch of half-broken boomboxes around the house, because he's one of those dads who refuses to throw away a lifetime's worth of faulty electronics, but still continues to buy bits and pieces of busted, discounted sound systems from yard sales and flea markets.
We ran an extension cord out to the backyard so we could plug in all the stereos and blast rap music from one of the local FM stations. Then, we dug three-inch deep holes by each of the boomboxes and covered the holes with leaves. We assumed that when the Klansmen came to kill the rappers they would obviously be fooled into thinking were performing a live concert in a random backyard in Ohio, they would fall into our camouflaged traps and be thwarted in their efforts.
Our master plan was based purely out of imagination, because in reality, my sister and I weren't masters of combat. We were just two kids doing our misguided best. So instead of waging an effective war on racism, all we really did was fuck up our dad's already broken boomboxes and pour a bunch of bullshit into some water balloons.
When he came home from work, our dad found his two kids and all of his stereo equipment covered in mud in the back yard. And I think he would've been mad at us for further damaging his already busted boomboxes, but he was already struggling with the emotional weight of teaching his children about the very real dangers of racism. So instead of getting angry, he gave my sister and I a hug and took the whole family out to McDonald's. And when you're four and six, very few things are as big a deal as getting to go to McDonald's in spite of the KKK.
My sister and I learned two very important lessons that day: 1.) Effective booby traps are way harder to make than it looks in the movies, and 2.) soap mixed with mud, glitter, and Lawry's Seasoning Salt does not constitute a magic potion, and it will not explode the way a four-year-old girl hopes it will. It does make a mess of the kitchen, though.
There's no real point to this story other than that my little sister and I have been fighting against white supremacy ever since we were kids, but we all still have a long way to go.