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Davis MacLeod Haines is an artist that grew up in Birmingham.

By Davis MacLeod Haines, an artist originally from Birmingham, soon to be Los Angeles-based. He can be found on Twitter at: @davismacleod.

Dear Mountain Brook,

I love you. I respect you. In so many ways, I am a product of you. That is why I feel compelled to write this letter.

I once believed my home to be near Utopian. It was all I knew when I was young and I had a beautiful childhood. It was only when I had the conscious awareness of its inherent surreality that my infallible admiration started to crack.

In the past few years, I have matured into the kind of adult who seeks to give back to the community from which I come. It is not lost on me that, though I was unique, I was embraced. I cannot help but notice that so many of my peers happily claim me as their own. Most importantly to me, a friend reminded me, they trust me. Yes, I pushed buttons and boundaries.

Yes, I often satirized the, to me, blatant ridiculousness of much of our culture, but, yes, I was a part of it. And my community accepted that.

For this reason, I am hurt.

This past trip home, my twin brother Charles and I walked to visit my aunt and uncle in Crestline Village. This route, one we have traversed genuinely countless times as children and as adults, one I used in a wheelchair after a serious accident, takes an average of 12 minutes. Just as we arrived at the elementary school where we were once students, a cop car drives past us, whips around, and parks.

The officer who came to speak to us was Officer Fischer. I introduced myself to him as a Southerner does: full name, handshake, eye contact. I'd hoped he'd see us as the harmless former residents we were. My brother followed. Then came the questioning.

"Where are you going? What are you doing?"

My stomach began to twist as I explained our simple visit.

"Where are you from?"

"Well, sir, actually I am from right here. We grew up down the street."

"Oh, is that right?"

His suspicion was clear as he then asked for our ID's. Charles, being braver than I, asked if that was necessary. His distrust grew.

"Did someone call on us?"

"You bet they did!" he said, sarcastically.

He stares at our ID's, both still containing the addresses of our childhood home, not a mile from where we stood. The evidence of my upbringing was clear. Still, he cocked his head to his radio and called in our license numbers to the station. While we waited for a response, I couldn't help myself.

"Sir, what about us do you think is suspicious?"

I mentally ran through our very-short walk in detail, trying to find something incriminating: smelling flowers, smiling at neighbors, an unsuccessful interaction with a cat.... These are all behaviors I have exhibited for years. Clearly it was something else.

"Probably the no shoes. Or the hair."

My brother and I were shoeless, this was absolutely true. But, in my memory, I have probably walked this route more shoeless than not! And our hair is, relative to our past, at a conservative length. I was starting to get upset.

We are, on the spectrum of abnormality in a predominantly white neighborhood, mild at most.

But what if we weren't? What if our skin were a few shades darker? Our heads wrapped in cloth? What if we were anything other than a slight diversion from this privileged norm? This realization dawned in me a warming fury of frustration.

"You know, officer, we were born and raised here.... We are good guys. You aren't going to find a record on us. We're just visiting my mom."

He ignored me but began to soften. Once the call came back clear, I could tell that he didn't want to keep us anymore and that this interaction had run its course. He wished us well and moved on.

But I did not. I couldn't help myself. A seed of pain had been sown in my heart.

I am a young, white, wealthy, cisgender American man. I was in an almost entirely white, wealthy, American town, my home no less. But I couldn't help but feel like I had had my first taste of what it must be like to be anything else in this country.

I cannot know what it is like to be black in America. I cannot know what it is like to be gay or to be a woman or to be an immigrant or to be anything other than what I am, but I now know what it feels to be "othered."

And it hurts.

To be accosted, however mildly, by a policeman in this country is frightening. The irony of the service they provide is that they are trying to keep their own community safe, and yet I, a former member, was filled with fear that I would be accosted again for disturbing the peace or, more aptly described, disturbing the norm.

Yes, this particular event was small. But it represents an important issue festering in this once-great nation.

If we are doing in our country to those who we fear what my former community did to me, than we are perpetuating discrimination, we are perpetuating our own ignorance, and we are postponing the kind of progress we so desperately need.

That said, Mountain Brook, I love you. I forgive you. But please, for the sake of our country and our community, let us not reject our own.

Love,

Davis