If I wasn’t white, I’d probably be dead

One night in college I almost died.

At least that’s what my friends told me the next morning as I retold the story of yelling at a college football player twice my height and at least three times my body mass who just happened to be known for his short fuse and bad temper.

I had gone to bed around midnight after studying until my brain was mush for a test I was particularly nervous for the next day. At 3am, I was woken up by a series of dull thumps and walls rattling. A California kid, I was used to earthquakes, so I was immediately on edge…until I realized I was in Oklahoma, nowhere near a fault line. (This was before fracking)

So I opened my door and headed down the stairs right outside my room, bleary eyed, scared, confused… ….to discover a huge beast of a dude punching a window screen so hard the building was rattling. This 1950s dorm building was cinder blocks and permanence, having survived multiple generations of dumbass kids. These window screens were the cockroaches of the construction world. The team had lost yet another game a few hours earlier and he was blowing off some steam. At 3am.

I stopped a few stair steps from the bottom of the staircase; I was near eye level with this huge dude. Before I knew it, I was yelling “HEY! WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?? WE ALL LIVE HERE AND NOT ONLY ARE WE TRYING TO SLEEP, WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO PAY FOR THAT SCREEN??”

As I told my friends this story the next day over breakfast and told them who the player was, the group couldn’t quite puzzle out how I wasn’t dead. Apparently, the temper was legendary. I shrugged my shoulders, laughing off the incident as we talked about it, and I finished my breakfast. Situation resolved and over… Right?

But as the day lingered on, it started to sink in… what was I thinking? I’d stood well within arm’s length (aka: punch distance) of a man who could have literally caved in my skull with one good hit and yelled cuss words at him. The more I thought about it, the more unsettled I got. Even though the incident had long passed.

I was pretty sure if I ran into this guy again (ya know, in the building where we both lived), he would come to his senses and squash me like a bug.

But in that moment, I had just acted. My stress, my exhaustion, and the compelling moment of irritation…combined with the sense of justice in that moment compelled me to act. My normally polite-at-all-costs demeanor had crumbled in an instant and could very well have ended in major consequences.

—

This story has been weighing on me a lot the last couple of months. Not so much the part of the story where I was yelling at a linebacker at 3am where I was putting my physical safety on the line. No, it was the part where for days my brain continued to turned over the potential consequences of that moment of stress-and-fear-turned-reaction. How the stress and the anxiety and the paranoia built up inside me as I thought about how if things had gone just a little bit differently…

But why now? Why was this story on my mind so much lately?

Because after a recent traffic stop, I realized that experienced that same situation: if things had gone just a little bit differently, or if we’re honest, if I wasn’t white, I could very well have been arrested, beaten, or maybe even been killed.

Let me say that again: If I wasn’t white, my life may have been severely impacted, ruined, or ended.

That’s not hyperbole.

In the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter protests and George Floyd’s death, I’ve continued a decade-plus long effort to understand the black experience in America as so many black people have shared their experiences dealing with the cops. In each one of these stories I hear, I try to put myself into their shoes to consider how I would feel, what I would do, empathize with and understand how that experience might take a toll.

And last week it dawned on me like an anvil to the head… if I was black, there’s a very good chance I wouldn’t have survived that last traffic stop.

Back in pre-pandemic January, I made a legal right hand turn onto a major highway near me (79 in Round Rock, Texas). This road is two wide lanes in each direction with a full turn lane/median in the middle. It’s a busy road, even around 10pm when I made this turn. I drive a Tesla and it can get up to speed quick and without much effort. I’ll openly admit that I didn’t think much about hitting about 10mph over the speed limit (45mph on a major road… a ridiculous speed trap setting in the first place, but that’s a different discussion). I was going with the flow of traffic and hadn’t made any aggressive or dangerous driving actions.

About a quarter mile past the right turn, a dark SUV made a crazy dangerous and aggressive U-turn and came right up on my bumper. I mean literal inches off my rear bumper. The SUV was so close to me I couldn’t see any details of it in the rearview mirror. I was looking for a way to get out of the way of this psycho, but I was boxed in by other cars and the curbed median. As I was reaching for my cell phone to figure out how to both defensively drive and call 911, this police SUV lights started flashing.

I pulled over into a parking lot, rolled down the window, and put my hands on the wheel. The officer approached quickly. I’ll admit: I was pissed. Mostly because he had just scared the bejesus out of me, but I was also filled with more than a little righteous indignation about his dangerous maneuvering. Even if I was a violent criminal he was looking for who’d just robbed a baby food store and killed a room full of grandmas, what was the value of getting that close to my rear bumper??

He approached the car with the usual police officer caution + anger. He made no mention of the dangerous moves as he went through his ticketing process. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t encourage engagement (never talk to cops). I recognized I had been speeding, so I was ready to accept the ticket.

But when he came back to the car with the ticket in hand, explaining everything about the ticketing process and nothing about his dangerous driving, he said six words to me that made me snap:

“Do you have any questions?”

What happens next is truly a fork in the road that absolutely would have had two different outcomes for a white man and a black man.

I replied.

I spoke back to this officer. An officer already (apparently) mad at me about something….not sure what exactly. My anger and more importantly my lingering fear and adrenaline that that officer caused blew a steam valve and I spoke to him. We’ve all been there, right? Sometimes you just gotta say something. Doesn’t matter your gender, color, status in life, or anything else… sometimes you just get pissed. Pissed from fear, from anger, from confusion… but pissed nonetheless. It’s not smart, but it happens.

I said: “Actually, sir, I do have a question. You really scared me back there when you got so close to my bumper. I couldn’t even see your car in my rearview you were so close. I nearly called 911 because I thought you were some sort of nut case chasing me. What was the value in that move? That seemed super dangerous…”

Before I share the officer’s response, I want you to imagine a black man saying that to the officer. Do you think this would have ended without handcuffs? Would it have ended without that officer claiming some sort of “resistance”? Or without him finding some other infraction?

I also want you to consider your response to me. Are you ready to tell me that I shouldn’t challenge the officer? Ready to excuse his behavior because #BlueLivesMatter and the streets are scary? Ready to tell me that my job, my only job as a citizen in front of the police is to say “yes sir” and “no sir”? If so, I demand you turn in your “Don’t Tread On Me” flag.

The officer looked up at me straight in the eyes, I mean really looked at me, and then turned away before I’d completed the end of my sentence and said abruptly “have a good night” in the most condescending tone anyone has ever spoken to me in my entire life (and I’ve been married three times).

Then he said the words that scared the hell out of me:

“No no no, we’re fine. It’s all good. We’re fine here.”

He was calming his partner. Whether he needed to or not, whether he was trying to scare me or not, it was a clear message: I have friends that want to hurt you. It felt like the bar fight where a guy comes after you and his friends are holding him back.

Remember: cops are trained from the first day of the academy that everyone, and I mean everyone they encounter on their shift is out to kill them. And they are also trained, as a cop Facebook friend of mine told me last week, that black men are more dangerous according to the crime statistics.

This was a routine traffic stop for a few miles per hour over the speed limit that had already shown my driving record to be 100% clean and they were still assuming that I was a big enough threat that the colleague was Ready. To. Go. Ready to shoot, ready to kill… or at least tase.

What if that officer was one of these “bad apples” we keep seeing so many examples of? What if he felt I needed to be taught a lesson about respecting authority? That moment could have changed my life in significant ways. He could have easily found an infraction to arrest me under the guise of or claimed resistance if I was irritable if he’d asked me to get out of the car. He could have called more officers to the scene, escalating and further stressing me until I said something that gave him the legal permission to push me to the ground and hurt me. He could have arrested me and taken me off to jail, causing problems with my job.

All because I was scared that I thought he was a nutter trying to run me off the road and told him that I was scared.

Reading this far, I have to imagine you’re standing a fork in the road. Two paths diverge in the woods.

The white man path probably has y’all thinking “Dude, you’re being pretty dramatic aren’t you? You don’t *know* that cop was thinking those things.” I can’t say for sure, but I can go off what I experienced and felt in that moment. And I can go off of what I hear cops saying in interviews and articles.

Or as my cop Facebook friend told me when I shared this story with him: “Your harrowing story about being stopped does sound pretty terrifying, but imagine what it’s like to stand in a riot line having bricks and Molotov cocktails thrown at you. Shots fired in your direction. Imagine what it’s like to try to arrest someone and you don’t know if you’re going to have to fight them or not. Imagine walking up to a car at night, not knowing if the driver plans to shoot you.”

Sure I don’t know if his use of the word “harrowing” was sarcastic, but it’s hard to believe that juxtaposition sets up anything other than sarcasm. Maybe he meant it honestly, and if so, I’m left to ask a simple question: why isn’t it OK for us civilians to ask for our experiences to be considered without the “yeah but what about me??” response?

The other path is the one that black men tell us is commonplace in their daily experience. This common experience for so many black people made real in one tiny instance for tiny moment is an amazing reminder of how different our lives are. Because as I said in the title of the article… if I wasn’t white, I’d probably be dead.

To my friends and neighbors of color I say simply:

I hear you. We hear you. We are working hard to understand. You matter.