Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and Los Angeles native, described on Twitter Friday how a security guard “tailed” her on her walk home.
“He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious,'” recalled the 22-year-old Harvard graduate.
Gorman said after she showed him her keys and buzzed herself into the building, he left without offering an apology.
“This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat,” Gorman wrote.
“In a sense he was right,” she wrote later. “I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”
Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, became a household name after her delivery of “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration caused an immediate sensation on social media. She went on to record a video of the poem “Chorus of the Captains,” which was played at the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida.