Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in history, claims she was racially profiled by a security guard who “Followed me on my walk home tonight.”
Gorman, a Harvard graduate and National Youth Poet Laureate, said the incident took place Friday night.
“He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious”, Gorman tweeted“I showed my keys and buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. “
Gorman, who celebrates her 23rd birthday on Sunday, called the incident “the reality of black girls.”
“One day you are called an icon, the next a threat,” she wrote in the tweet.
“In a way he was right,” Gorman said in another tweet. “I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, inequality, ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is a clear and fatal danger to the existing powers. “
The Los Angeles native mesmerized viewers at President Biden’s inauguration ceremony with her moving rendition of The Hill We Climb, a work about unity, healing and perseverance.
“When the day comes, we wonder: where can we find light in this infinite shadow?” Gorman started her inaugural poem.
She continued: “And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we endured and witnessed a nation that is not broken, but simply unfinished. “