I was driving home one evening about five years ago when a cop car pulled up behind me with siren and flashing lights. As the officer walked to my car, I fished out my license and registration and put them on my lap.
I should pause here to note that I am white, female, and over sixty. I was driving my own car, and while I have a large catalog of youthful indiscretions, there are no actual violations on my record. Aware of the bubble of privilege around me, I wasn’t worried about the cop’s approach. Still, as someone who follows the news and is awake if not woke, I knew enough to put both hands on the steering wheel. I have no doubt there are gray-haired ladies somewhere who feel the need to pack heat.
The officer was young, white, and female. She asked if I knew I had run a stop sign (I didn’t know), and if there was a reason I had done that. “No reason,” I said dully. “Just tired. I just finished teaching an English class, and I’m tired.”
This was all perfectly true, though I was not unaware of the performative aspects of announcing it.
The officer nodded and returned to her car to run my license. When she came back, she said she would let me off with a warning. Her face softened as she added, “My mother is a teacher, too. So I know how tired they get.”
I thanked her and drove home, relieved that my brush with the law had been minor. Yet I felt somehow unclean. Had I gamed the system? I hadn’t said anything untrue. Still, I felt like I had cheated.
The traffic stop most likely would not have gone the same way had I been Black and male. A white officer could not have looked at such a driver and seen her own mother. Would she have even seen a human being, innocent of anything more than a thoughtless error on the way home after an exhausting day?
Would a Black driver have made it home safely after that stop, with a courteous warning, or would he have met the same fate as Philando Castile, Samuel DuBose, Walter Scott, Daunte Wright, and now Tyre Nichols, to name only a few?
On the bodycam footage released by Memphis police, Nichols is heard to say, “I'm just trying to go home.”
I didn’t game the system, because I didn’t need to. The system was set up for me. I have benefitted from it all my life. I thought I understood white privilege before my traffic stop, but understanding something intellectually and feeling it in one’s body are very different. I think about that experience each time another Black driver is killed after being pulled over for a broken tail light. I think about what it will take to end that kind of policing and the larger system of racism it is part of – and about what responsibility I have, safe in my bubble, to make that happen.
I enjoy reading your blog, Cathy. "White privilege" has to do with treating people with respect and should be accorded to everyone. It's good that police treat some people with respect but they should treat everybody with respect. It's unfortunate that some police don't do that with non-white people, and police departments should correct the behavior. I have my own story about getting pulled over by police. I was driving with an elderly academic friend in the front seat and got pulled over for making a right turn from the middle lane (after carefully looking around to make sure it was safe) because I had just bought a GPS and was trying to follow it and almost missed my turn. I presented my license and registration and mentioned that I teach at the university whose campus I was pulling out of. The policeman wrote up a "warning" and told me to "remember the criminology majors" when I grade their exams, and shook hands before he left. LOL!
Well said.