The recent turmoil and subsequent protests surrounding the death of black men in police custody has caused me to look back at a particular event in my youth frequently over the past few days.
It occurred either when I was seventeen or eighteen years old, falling during the summer either following my senior year of high school or my first year of college - the vagaries of recollection make it too hard to locate it more precisely. The year would have been either 1988 or 1989.
I was at an event at the Mendota Community Center - a dance perhaps - and my friends and I were leaving the event to move to a second location. I suspect that location was The Pond - a property belonging to a friend that is now, tragically no longer with us. And because of the location, I was going to run home to change before meeting others there, my fancy dance clothes not suitable for laying in the grass under the stars.
I hopped in my car - to give you a complete picture here, it was a 1976 Triumph Spitfire. Spitfire always seemed an awfully grand name for such a tiny machine, but it would have accurately described the attitude of the teenager operating at the time. You can see it, and said attitude, below.
I hopped in the Spitfire and left the parking lot, rolled along the access road, out onto 251, and headed north. I was in a hurry, of course, because I wanted to rejoin the group, and that was what as on my mind as I rolled under the viaduct and saw red and blue lights starting to flash in my rear view mirror.
The first thing that flashed in my mind was the realization that, in my rush to head home and change, I had not put my seatbelt on.
The seatbelt requirement was a relatively new law in Illinois. Wikipedia says that it passed in January of 1988 and, while I actually didn’t have any opposition to wearing a seatbelt - years of reading Car and Driver in the school library during study hall convinced me that wearing them was the right call - I’d neglected it in this case.
I was certain I hadn’t done anything else that represented a violation - I wasn’t speeding (the Spitfire, despite its name, couldn't have exceeded even the in-town limit in the space I’d traveled), the registration was current, all the lights were functional. But I’d had experience with the local police in my prior high school years, and did not want the indignity of yet another ticket. And I didn’t think I could pull on the belt without the cop seeing it - I was in a convertible with the top down, after all.
So I arrived at a brilliant solution.
I opened the door, stepped up out of the car, turned to face the police car, raised my hands and arms out to the side, and shouted "WHAT?!?".
The officer was about halfway out his car door when I did this. He stopped with a jerk, looked at me, and then stood the rest of the way up. "Well", he said "I thought you may not have come to a complete stop at the stop sign coming out of the community center."
"Well I did." I said angrily, and stared at him.
There was a brief pause, and then he said "Okay." And he let me go on my way.
I’m sure I celebrated this that night - regaled my friends at The Pond about my successful police circumvention, my cleverness in escaping the ticket. There may have even been a high five or two.
Thirty years later all I can think about with it is just how goddamn lucky I was. He did not take my license, did not ask for proof of insurance, did not run my plates...
...did not shoot me for jumping out of a car in the middle of a police intervention.
But the reality is, I wasn’t lucky. I was white.
I mean really white. My skin is nearly translucent, even in the middle of summer. I was raised in a middle-class family in a small town in northern Illinois. I grew up with both parents in the home, and wanted for nothing. Hell - I had a classic British sports car that, yes, I "paid for" myself, as long as "paying for" doesn’t include having to pay license fees or the astonishing insurance costs that went with being a teenage male, then as now.
I was so white that being pulled over by a police officer was an irritation, not a moment of fear. I was so white that it seemed like a good idea to jump out of a car and confront an armed authority figure.
I was so white that it worked.
Now, it may be possible for a person to look at this situation and say "well, you got very lucky there, but that was certainly a fluke - that sort of thing wouldn't happen twice."
Ok.
In my mid 20’s MLW and I were driving back home from an event late in the evening. We’d driven there separately, so we were each piloting our own vehicle - she a Nissan Sentra SE-R and me in my Honda Civic Si. The type of vehicle is important here because they both fell into the category of factory suped-up enconomy cars. We rolled up to the toll booths on the Harlem road bridge, each in our own lane. We looked at each other across the tool booth, eyes connecting with a moment of unspoken agreement...
And then we launched out of the toll booths like they were a starting gate, tires squealing and snapping each car through clutch drops and gear changes. This was great fun, and we continued the race, at speeds somewhere north of the posted limit, until we got to the turn for our residential neighborhood.
It was s few blocks down that street that we were pulled over - both of us, by at least two police cars, with a third joining shortly - about a block away from our home.
There was no jumping out of the car this time. The officers kept us separate, and started asking me if I was in a fight or an argument with the woman in the other car. MLW was fielding similar questions, along with a being asked whether she felt safe returning to her home with me there. To their credit, they were clearly concerned for her safety, thinking that I was perhaps chasing her as part of a fight or an argument. She assured them this was not the case, and for my part I admitted that we had impulsively done something that was probably a bad idea.
The outcome? Satisfied that MLW was not in domestic peril, they sent us home, with an admonition not to be seen racing each other about the vicinity again. No arrest, no ticket, not even a written warning. Tho - notably, they did laugh at us, particularly the fact that MLW was beating me in the race.
It wasn’t a fluke. We were engaged in behavior that resulted in multiple cars being called, multiple officers on the scene. And we were clearly in the wrong, clearly in violation, and we were simply let go.
MLW, to be clear, is also white.
As we continue to experience civil unrest across the nation social media starts to sprout various responses as people try to process a reality that has been present, but somewhat hidden from polite public view. I’ve even seen folks - notably folks who, like myself, are quite Caucasian - post the idea that white privilege does not exist.
I read that sort of thing, and then look back at that moment in my little blue sports car. I think the reality is that, for many people, perhaps most, the presence of that privilege is subtle, woven tightly into the fabric of life, making it sometimes challenging to see. Most people don’t have the stark experience that I do of having done things that are extremely ill advised and that would have likely gotten someone without my advantages arrested at best, and shot at worst.
It’s clear to me that my privilege exists, and that I’ve benefited - and frankly survived - as a result of it.