This year, my thoughts have been turning back a lot to the one police encounter I had in college. It was basically nothing, and I’d almost forgotten about it... which is precisely why I keep picking at the memory. It was nothing because I happened to be a white kid.
One night I was driving home on a completely empty avenue through a pretty beaten-down part of the city. Suddenly a cop appeared several blocks back, turned on his lights, and came tearing up to pull behind me.
I stopped and let him step up to my window, and he seemed a little taken aback to see me once he looked into the car. He asked me a couple of questions, chided me for changing lanes in the middle of an intersection, and let me go without even a written warning.
It seemed unlikely that he was able to see me change lanes in an intersection from 3-4 blocks back, in the dark of night, but I shrugged it off because he clearly saw I was a good kid and hey, maybe I actually DID do something slightly improper on an empty road. Thanks, officer!
As less of a sheltered naïf, I understand the lane thing was a pretext. He was stopping a clunky old behemoth of a Buick in a predominately black part of town; that stop would have been a stop-and-search, and possibly more, had I not been a skinny white kid from the local college
Nothing about race and policing in America has changed since then. It just took me a long time (and lots of social media) to realize that I get to glide through this country’s reality effortlessly in ways that are impossible for many others. Sorry, I’m working on my obliviousness
