When Earned Power Doesn't Translate: A Christmas Night in North Carolina

They took my money, called the police, and proved exactly what I've been saying about legitimacy

Last night’s story moved quickly online, and I understand why. It has the surface shape of something simple: a paid pickup order, an unnecessary escalation, a bad interaction on a holiday night when I was already exhausted and hungry.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the money. And it wasn’t even really the food—though I truly was hungry.

What stayed with me was something harder to name in real time: the bodily sensation of being misread, of being treated as less legitimate than the facts of the situation required, and of watching how easily ordinary rules can stop applying when someone decides you are safe to disregard.

It took me a little time to put language to that distress, because the most modern forms of discrimination don’t always announce themselves with obvious hatred. They show up as misrecognition, as selective enforcement, as escalation—things that can sound abstract until you’ve felt them in your body. And the closer your proximity is to power—or to observing how power works—the more sharply you can feel the difference between how you are perceived and how you should be perceived.

This essay is my attempt to name what happened, and to name why it matters beyond one night and one restaurant. I’m writing it because these dynamics shape who is treated as enforceable in public life, who is granted the benefit of the doubt, and who is subject to escalation when a situation could have been resolved routinely.

I’m okay this morning. I slept. I’m steadier. For an OB, six hours is practically luxury. But being “fine” is not the same thing as something being acceptable—and that distinction is the point. The incident matters, and this essay explains why.

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📍What Happened

On Christmas night, while I was still on call, I left the hospital during a brief window to do something I hadn’t been able to do since Tuesday morning: eat a real meal.

If you’re reading this without context: this is about a prepaid pickup order, a locked door, a refusal to hand over paid-for food, and a police escort—on Christmas night—while I was still on call.

Not “grab something when you can” food. Not crackers between pages. Not a protein bar swallowed in a stairwell. A real meal—the kind that reminds your body you are a person, not a machine that keeps working because the pager keeps chirping. My kids were sick at home, recovering from the flu, and I was already carrying the quiet grief that comes with missing a holiday you can’t get back. The day was so busy I kept having to remind myself it was even Christmas. People would say, “Merry Christmas,” and I’d have this split-second pause—oh right—before moving on to the next patient, the next urgent decision.

It was around 8 p.m. in a small-to-medium-sized town in North Carolina. On Christmas Day, most restaurants are closed, and the few that stay open advertise it like a badge of honor. Red Lobster was one of them—one of the few places openly claiming they were operating on normal hours. There weren’t many alternatives. That scarcity matters.

So I did what a reasonable person does in a limited-options situation: I placed a Grubhub pickup order and paid. The transaction was complete. They accepted my money. This wasn’t a dispute over whether I had paid. It wasn’t “we’re closed.” It wasn’t “we can’t make that.” Payment had already been accepted.

That detail matters because it eliminates the easiest storyline for people who want to dismiss this.

💢 I didn’t show up after closing demanding special treatment.

💢 I didn’t try to force a kitchen to produce something impossible.

I placed an order, paid for it, and arrived during the stated pickup window to retrieve what I purchased.

Grubhub sent curbside pickup instructions by text at about 8:06 p.m. It listed an expected pickup window—8:45 to 8:55 p.m.—and it provided a number to call for curbside service. I followed the instructions. My call log shows I called the curbside number at 8:40 p.m. for four minutes. I then called the restaurant line at 8:44 p.m. No one answered.

So I went to the door, because again: the order had been accepted, charged, and confirmed.

The door was locked. I entered only after another customer opened it. Inside, staff told me they were not accepting online orders.

💢 Read that slowly: not accepting online orders—after accepting and charging an online order.

In any functional commercial system, once payment is accepted, the exchange is no longer optional. If a business cannot fulfill the order, the correct response is to cancel it and issue an immediate refund with documentation. That is not a moral debate. That is basic commerce.

That is not what happened.

Instead, staff refused to provide the food and refused to provide clear, immediate refund confirmation in the moment. While I stood there being told they weren’t accepting online orders, I watched active service continuing in the restaurant. A man only a few feet from me received multiple bags of food. I saw additional trays of freshly prepared food coming out.

‼️ Food was moving.

‼️ Service was continuing.

‼️ I was the exception.

So I asked for the manager on duty and requested the only reasonable outcome: fulfill the paid order or cancel it and document the refund. Rather than resolve a routine consumer transaction, staff escalated by calling the police.

I did not simply walk out. I left escorted out by the police. ‼️

On Christmas night. While still on call. After days of not being able to leave the hospital to eat. In a town where most places were closed—which is why I ordered from one of the few restaurants claiming to be open.

That is the story. Those are the facts. I’m also pursuing the paper trail: I will be requesting the police report as a public record, because escalation should always be documented—not hand-waved away.

And if you’re reading this thinking, this is irrational, this is unbelievable, this makes no sense—you’re right. Which brings me to the point.

They took my money, withheld the food, and ended the interaction with a police escort—on Christmas night.

🔍 What This Actually Was

Most people misunderstand discrimination because they imagine it as an emotion.

They picture overt hostility: slurs, explicit hatred, someone who wants to take rights away and feels comfortable saying so. That version exists, but it is not the only form, and it is not the most common form many Black professionals are navigating.

Modern discrimination is often a technique rather than a feeling. It’s not always “I hate you.” It is often “I can do this to you.”

It is the unequal distribution of burdens—who gets denied, delayed, dismissed, humiliated, or escalated on—because someone has decided, consciously or unconsciously, that you have less leverage to make consequences real.

And one of the most powerful techniques is misrecognition: the refusal to recognize legitimate authority and standing when it appears in certain bodies, especially Black bodies, even when that authority has been earned through the most conventional pathways our society claims to reward.

We live inside power infrastructures. Everyone knows this, even if we pretend not to, because naming it makes people uncomfortable. Power comes in many forms: financial power, social power, institutional power, symbolic power. Certain roles carry standing because society depends on predictable recognition of legitimacy.

A priest may not have wealth but still be treated with deference because the role is coded as authoritative. A physician carries institutional legitimacy because medicine sits at the center of life and death. Leaders, founders, executives, people embedded in institutions are generally treated differently not because they are “better,” but because society assumes they are enforceable.

In a functioning society, power is supposed to travel with you.

Not as worship. Not as entitlement. As predictability. As baseline recognition that the person in front of you has standing that cannot be casually ignored.

But for many Black professionals, the defining injury is that earned power does not reliably translate. It does not consistently travel. Credentials become situational. Standing becomes optional. Black authority is recognized when it’s convenient—when it can be applauded, marketed, used, or admired—and ignored when it’s inconvenient.

That is the mechanism.

This is Black authority—ignored when it’s inconvenient.

And if this sounds “too big” to map onto one night at one restaurant, consider how familiar the pattern is at the highest levels of American life. A significant portion of the country could look at a sitting President of the United States—Barack Obama—and insist he was not truly American: not a U.S. citizen, not eligible, not “one of us.” That wasn’t a policy disagreement. That was misrecognition at scale: the refusal to let earned authority travel when it lived in a Black body. 

Or consider Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor, returning to his own home and forcing open a stuck door—then being arrested at that home after police responded to a break-in report. You can debate the personalities involved, but the structure is the point: Black standing did not function as protective legitimacy in the moment it mattered; escalation did. 

That line makes some people uncomfortable because it forces clarity. It refuses the soothing story that this is just “a misunderstanding” or “a personality clash.” It forces us to ask why the usual rules of legitimacy and deference did not apply.

Because if we are honest, what happened at that restaurant was not just that someone was rude. It was that multiple people behaved as if a completed transaction did not bind them, as if withholding paid-for goods was a reasonable option, and as if escalating to police rather than resolving a routine refund was normal. That’s not a customer service lapse. That’s a legitimacy decision.

Escalation is not neutral.

Calling the police turns a basic consumer dispute into a confrontation with a state-backed enforcement apparatus. It increases risk instantly. It shifts the question from “how do we solve this?” to “how do we remove her?” And in America, we all know that police involvement does not carry equal risk for everyone. Escalation is a tool. It is a choice. It is a way of imposing consequence on the person you believe is safest to punish.

That’s why this cannot be reduced to “customer service.”

If the restaurant truly was not accepting online orders, there were multiple non-punitive solutions available: cancel the order, refund it immediately, provide documentation, apologize, and move on. That is what happens for many people every day. The system has a script for this.

But the script I encountered was different: deny, dismiss, and escalate. And denial becomes especially powerful when the context is scarcity—when it’s Christmas night, the town is quiet, and options are limited.

And the question that clarifies why is the one people avoid because it forces them to admit how society actually works:

Does anyone credibly believe this sequence—prepaid order, refusal to fulfill, observed others receiving food, insistence on resolution, police called, customer escorted out—would have unfolded the same way if I were a white man? Most people, if they are honest, do not believe that.

This is what modern discrimination looks like: Black authority treated as optional, and escalation used when recognition becomes inconvenient.

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⚖️ Why This Matters

It matters because public legitimacy is not a vibe. It’s infrastructure.

Public legitimacy is the social recognition that your standing is real, enforceable, and consequential. It is what makes institutions negotiate rather than dismiss. It is what makes people think twice before escalating. It is what makes “policy” suddenly flexible, and what makes a simple transaction resolve itself without drama.

And power is not only what you possess. Power is what other people believe you can use.

If people believe you can create consequences, they respond differently. They de-escalate. They resolve. They treat you as legitimate. If people believe you cannot, they test you. They stonewall you. They escalate on you. They treat you as socially unenforceable.

That belief does not stay inside one restaurant on one night. It travels.

It travels into workplaces, where Black executives are asked to “prove” leadership in ways their peers are not. It travels into hospitals, where Black physicians are undermined and Black patients are doubted. It travels into schools, where Black authority is treated as negotiable and Black children are disciplined for behaviors that read as normal in others. It travels into housing markets and courtrooms and boardrooms and police encounters. It becomes a pattern: whose legitimacy is automatic, and whose must be constantly re-earned.

And that is why this matters to everyone who claims to care about opportunity. Because opportunity does not exist in a vacuum. Opportunity requires enforceable legitimacy. It requires that earned power be allowed to translate into durable security.

This is where modern racism is often misdefined. People want to locate racism in language: whether someone used a slur, whether someone “meant it,” whether someone has the right feelings in their heart.

But the biggest racial harms in America are not sustained primarily by people saying the N-word. They are sustained by systemic failures of translation—the failure of Black education to convert to the same stability, the failure of Black income to convert to the same wealth, the failure of Black credentials to convert to the same presumption of competence and protection.

💢 That is how the racial wealth gap persists.

💢 That is how unequal outcomes persist.

Not only through overt hatred, but through the steady undermining of whether Black authority is allowed to become enforceable power. You can sanitize language and still preserve hierarchy if you keep making Black legitimacy negotiable.

And once enough people are trained to experience Black legitimacy as negotiable, bigger fantasies become politically possible: the fantasy that citizenship itself is something “we” can confer or revoke based on belonging, loyalty tests, or identity. That entitlement does not appear out of nowhere—it grows in the soil of everyday misrecognition, everyday selective enforcement, everyday escalation.

To be clear: U.S. law does not make citizenship infinitely revocable at someone’s whim. There are legal constraints, and denaturalization is legally bounded and contested. But the existence of formal constraints does not prevent a cultural drift toward the idea that some people’s status is inherently more precarious—more conditional—more available for punishment. 

When earned power does not translate, it forces constant leakage: more time spent fighting for basic recognition, more vulnerability to arbitrary escalation, more exposure to humiliation, more energy diverted from building, leading, changing, creating.

And for those of us who are trying to make transformative change—trying to build new infrastructures of care, accountability, and protection—this is not an abstract insult. It is a structural constraint.

Because change requires power. And power requires legitimacy.

If a society can look at a Black physician-founder—someone working on Christmas while her kids are sick at home—and still treat her as a person whose money can be taken and whose presence can be policed, it sends a signal that does not stay local. It teaches the world, quietly, that Black authority is contestable.

That is why I will not treat this as trivial.

I am not asking for reverence. I am not asking for a special category of humanity. I am asking for the basic consistency the country claims to believe in: if you accept payment, you deliver the goods or you refund immediately; if you cannot resolve a transaction, you do not escalate to law enforcement to remove a customer who is requesting a routine remedy.

And I am naming the deeper truth behind why it happened at all: Black authority is recognized when it’s convenient and ignored when it’s inconvenient. ‼️

If we actually believe in opportunity, earned power must be allowed to translate.

Because legitimacy cannot be conditional.

It has to be real.

A society that treats Black legitimacy as negotiable will eventually treat Black citizenship, safety, and authority as negotiable too.

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💭 A question: Have you experienced something similar? A moment where the rules that should have applied and didn’t? Where your standing was treated as negotiable?

If you have, I’d like to hear about it. Not for collection or spectacle—but because these patterns become clearer when we name them together.

Comment below if you’re willing to share. Even if it felt small. Even if you were told to let it go. The conversation matters. Your voice in it matters.