(A/N: I'm keeping the voice-over if only to have the original dogwhistles I saw around me as I was recording it. I apologize for the static and other sound issues; if/when I record the other parts I will try even harder to limit that as much as possible)
(A/N: Despite Substack saying I could post this all in one article, it won’t let me so I'm splitting it up into 3 parts)
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I thought
“178871”
Was a cute palindrome
Until I saw
The numbers in the center
Imagine if it were “148841”
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Dog whistles in CT license plates aren't a figment of my mentally ill brain. They are real, but most people don't care to acknowledge it. From the link:
"Other approved license plates were not so clear, but experts said some could be white supremacist code. “HHX888,” for example, could be a way to obscure the use of the numbers “88,” which the ADL’s database said refers to “heil Hitler” and is, “One of the most common white supremacist symbols.”"
I don't agree with Pitcavage in the article, though, who believes that these license plates are one-offs or rare. I personally see them every day and have been seeing them regularly for years. I think it's indicative of a larger problem of racism rising in this state and in this country.
“The Anti-Defamation League reports about one in every 10 Connecticut communities was targeted in 2022 with white supremacist flyers, appearing across every region and size of town and city.” "...making Connecticut 9th in the nation for these incidents."
Even worse than that, is that this issue isn't the first time it has occurred in the USA and not simply an issue in this country. We are living through a global increase in the normalization of bigotry and hatred.
“8 times? 8 times?”- BLM860 member referring to whoever placed 8 nooses at the Amazon warehouse site in Windsor, CT. An incident that is indicative of a larger issue in this state.
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These license plate combinations are on cars owned by people who seem to want to cause me and others harm and/or force the stress of the situation to kill me from the inside out.
(A/N: 3/25/24 4:56 PM: I go back and forth between alluding to and outright accusing these people of terrorizing me. I believe it's occurring. I don't want to believe it's happening. I don't want to be sued for the ones being used who don't notice or want to not believe what is happening around them.)
(A/N: 10/31/23 3:45 PM: Maintenance is “cleaning" our homes by spraying a pool cleaner/chlorine mixture on my backyard and porch and plants and seem to be wanting to bother me on purpose. There’s a car with “HH” in its license plates parked in front of my house.)
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Sometimes I think, as my therapist and Mom have suggested, that maybe the folks with these combinations in their license plates don't know what they mean. Maybe the combinations are there as a coincidence and I need to chill out because no one is trying to come after me. Nobody is watching me, stalking me or mean me any harm and all of this is me stepping into the psychosis that was always latent inside me. I am just, and only have been, “crazy” in the most derogatory and stereotypical use of the word. I have psychosis or schizophrenia and I need to check into a psych ward because these are just delusions. (Train toots 4 times)
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So, I started to record the license plates: when I saw them, about where I was and what it seems like they were meaning to say. A rudimentary translation, if you will. From how I’ve noticed it, I don’t believe I'm "just and only crazy". Perhaps to an extent, I've been driven crazy, "crazymade" in my opinion, but, most people seem to have a strong inclination to see danger in front of them and walk head first into it, in denial of the danger, willfully oblivious of the outcome of it and, yet, also, highly prepared to get mad when things don’t go their right way (At least that’s the notion I’ve gotten from The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin De Becker). As though “it's just life and sometimes in life, things are going to want to cause you harm and you have to learn to steel yourself against it. Walk through the flames and force yourself to come out unscarred by the flames!” As though to seek to limit the amount of harm to be caused to you is (car honk) unnecessary paranoia; why not just be a vulnerable victim and allow yourself to be used, abused and blamed?
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I did something like that. To the best of my ability, I tried to follow the advice of so many to a tee, even, forcing myself to smile through the pain, pushing my boundaries, trying so hard to not let most folks see me cry or sweat and stood up for myself as often as I could. I “faked it ‘til I made it”, but I never even got to “make it”. There's a lot of factors as to why I didn't “make it” (undiagnosed illnesses, family issues, money, etc.), but one of them seemed to have been a backlash from the people around me who seemed to be mad and defensive at the fact that this specific Black woman (me) was walking around like the Queen of Sheba. They seemed to want to know what my recipe for success was, the source of my joie de vivre. They seemed to want to devour me. They seem to have hastened the weathering of my body by endlessly and daily triggering me, going out of their way to make me feel as uncomfortable and unwanted as possible. They have isolated me, ostracized me (something that could be considered on the level of communal bullycide), and seem to be stalking me, pushing me further into a depression that I was already trying to recover from.
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If you ask these people, the ones with the dogwhistles in their license plates, the people who seem to want to stand and stare in my line of direction, the managers and employees of stores who “keep an eye on me” inside (car honk) and outside of the store or the random people in my community who seem to rush out onto their porches or sidewalks when I pass by, they'll say they A) have 0 idea of who I am, which is such bullshit obfuscation, in my opinion, because, in the last week alone, folks have followed me around stores and positioned themselves in places to "keep an eye on me" BECAUSE it is me or B) I was a quiet, taller-than-most-of-the-men Black woman with a stern face and that made them (car honk) (3/12/24, 9:25pm - car honk) feel a type of ways. I remember when I came here in the Winter of 2017, I was deeply depressed having tried to take my own life after not being able to pass my classes in University (story as old as time, amirite?) and shaved my head to have a fresh start and these people didn't like me then. The women were jealous and iced me out of their groups and the men were perverts who constantly, flagrantly and unabashedly stared at my ass and chest, undressing me with their eyes; one of them who I constantly caught doing it had even been licking his lips before he saw me glaring at him. Then he just turned away, acting like he hadn't done it and waited for me to look away long enough so he could do it again. He still works there and is protected by the women who still ice me out.
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According to my woman superior at the time, because they never put their hands on me or said anything explicitly sexual, it doesn't count as sexual harassment. I think the logic would go, and it certainly felt like, "You're mad because men were looking at you?! So now men can't even LOOK at a woman without being called a pervert?! Stop being so sensitive, snowflake!" The women don't like me and side with the men, so I’ve been dealing with this antagonistic energy for years. It's expanded from just occurring in my town to happening all over New England, up and down the East Coast and probably the whole country. To be honest, this was already happening at University, but I was in denial about it; I still thought it was only my fault and if I could reconfigure myself in one way or another, folks would warm up to me and accept me. If I proved that I could take the punches and roll with them, play the dozens on the daily, they would like me. I was wrong. They don't seem to have ever liked me, or only liked me if I fit specific parameters. They don't like me now and seemingly have gathered everyone they know to cause me harm. To either silently kill me themselves or force my body into a hastened internal weathering; or both.
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Okay, maybe not EVERYONE they know and maybe not EVERY SINGLE PERSON is like this, I’m being a bit hyperbolic here. But, it's enough people that I feel like I can't go anywhere (can't even sit in my own house?) without someone (“66.66667%” of folks?) seemingly meaning to trigger me with something they do or have on them (looking at you Conservative Haitians who stalk me and are angered by my being [It’s ironic because it’s not specifically Haitians in my community with which I personally have a vendetta or issue with. I USUALLY just keep to myself. It is, in fact, a DIVERSE coalition of people terrorizing me but the ire of Haitian people is most fresh in my being as I’m rewriting this. So many Haitian people will remind me of the Haitian revolution and it reminds me of Jamaicans who also look down upon USA born African descended people because we didn’t “fight back” or “rebel” like their islands did. Yet RIGHT NOW in the USA, there are those of them co-signing themselves to a history and story that shows the deeply held prejudices in communities of color. It’s not just Haitians keeping an eye on me, there’s Cubans and Puertoriccans and Peruvians and Guatemalans and Jamaicans and people from continental African countries and Ukrainians and white people and Asian people and USA born African descended people who are daily terrorizing me). Like the men, especially for some particular reason, and very early on, the taxi cab men, who double back or drive slow in their cars so they can see me walking (often from behind), people with these dog whistles in their license plates or the “(train horns)” and “(car honks)” that I only ever seem to hear in order for them to let me know that, somehow, I'm always being watched, listened to and followed, everything is a coincidence and nothing happens purposefully. Despite seeing and documenting it with my own eyes, reading articles, seeing newsbites and doing a pseudo kind of research of exactly what I'm being terrorized with, it's only ever seen as a coincidence.
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So, after going to a supermarket earlier this year, going in and out of it twice and seeing a license plate that was written as (I'm going to try to censor some of the lettering since I don't know the laws on this; is it illegal to post someone else's license plate on the internet?) “_88*KYS” (distant train toot) on the third time out, I chose to, if I couldn't do anything else, try my best to keep track of these “messages” in the license plates around me in this car obsessed culture of ours (but, [car honk] in my hypothesis, this is only the tip of the iceberg). So, here's a glimpse of them. I can only give y'all a glimpse because if I gave any more, we'd be here for a while.
Let's start with all the plates that have “KYS” in them and the other plates that I would also see on the days when I would see them.
What I find interesting about this phrase, “KYS”, is that, pre-2021, maybe, most people who knew what it meant would read it as "Kill YourSelf". I've heard (and seen) anecdotes from creators of people in their livestream chats, comment sections or private messages typing this out to them. Now, if you look it up on Urbandictionary, people are trying to say it means "Keep Yourself Safe". Sure, it could mean both, but my first introduction to it was as the first definition: "KYS" meaning “Kill Yourself”.
Never in my life did I imagine that I would see this phrase outside of the context of the internet and never did I think people would begin to weaponize it. That's what I think is happening, anyway; people are weaponizing harmful language in covert ways to trigger people, further weathering and crazymaking them (because I know I'm not the only one this is or has happened to) which will lead to either ostracism from their community, forced hospitalization, imprisonment and/or death. A form of microaggressive reactively abusive passive systematic terrorism that I'm supposed to be too unaware to even notice but, because I have, is tailored to me and whoever else this is happening to.
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1/16/23
At NY Supermarket, in the parking lot
KK_*_88_ ("KK?" like an anagram, to me, and has always looked one letter off from "KKK"; “88” is the other dog whistle)
KWK*88__ ("KWK/KLK" combination is dual, both being one letter off from "KKK" and having extra messages; "KWK", phonetically, like “Quick” [to say they’re faster than me?], and "KLK", phonetically, like “Click” [to say they see me taking pictures of their license plates?], with “88”, again)
_88*KYS (“88”, again, with "KYS", whose combination I see as the earlier usage of it, "Kill YourSelf")
4/16/23
KLM*____ (anagram like "BLM" means "Black Lives Matter", but the "K" insinuates [through my biased interpretation?] "Klan Lives Matter?)
KYS*8___ (I'll now stop noting the duplicates and only note the different ones, leaving the plates open to interpretation)
(Continued in Part 2)