Confessions of a Tall Black Guy: Intimidation Factor

It's time for another installment of "Confessions of a Tall Black Guy!” This week I'm going to talk about Intimidation.

 Being vertically gifted comes with a lot of positives and negatives. While I love being as tall as I am, like I said last time, my personality doesn't match with what society views that of a tall black guy should be. Though I don't particularly think this is a "tall and black" problem, but who knows?

When I was in High School, I got hassled to play on the basketball team all of 9th and 10th grade. I eventually gave in and joined the team my Junior year, and while I still don't think basketball is for me, I enjoyed being on the team for the most part.

However, there was always one thing they wanted me to do that I could never bring myself to do, and that was to be intimidating. Throughout my first year of basketball, everyone on the team would constantly tell me to be intimidating, because I was the tall one, and no one was going to take me seriously if I kept smiling all the time. I even had to retake our team photo and look more menacing because the original wasn't serious enough. I know what they were trying to do. They were trying to make it so the other team sees me and thinks "Oh man, that guy is scary", but if they knew who I was (and they all did since our school had only 600 students K-12) they would know that's not the kind of person I am. I was told that if I bulked up a bit a lot of people would be intimidated by me and that this would be a good thing.

I'm going to ask one question though, why would you want people to be afraid of you? I don't want to walk around having people cower in fear of me because I look crazy intimidating. I'd rather people just treat me normally because I already feel when I initially meet people  they are intimidated by my height, and they don't know what to expect so they don't interact with me as much.

This has trained me to smile as much as possible when meeting new people, or even dress a certain way but that's a topic for another day!

The thing that gets me every time though is that I've had some of my friends or just people I've known for quite some time come up to me and say "You know I was kind of afraid of you when I first saw you" which I don't get why you would tell someone that. Was that supposed to make me feel better? Am I supposed to be sorry for scaring you? How do you respond to that? It’s like going up to someone saying "Oh man! I thought you might have been a serial killer so I avoided talking to you at first," a little extreme I know, but I'm trying to make a point. For the most part, I'm trying to be as un-intimidating as I possibly can, it seems to not be as often as it once was but I think it’s going to be awhile before I can walk around with my Sonic shirt on and not have people give me a look of horror!