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1/? I was pulled over once really shortly after I got my license. Bro and me were driving home from a band concert in our stupid band tuxes. I drove by a cop who had pulled someone over - my mistake was not clearing the lane next to the stopover. https://twitter.com/collectdust/status/1381761767806734336
So he followed me and put his flashers on, and I...changed lanes. He couldn’t be after me, I figured. He followed me into the lane. I changed again, we went through a stoplight, he changed with me, and then he shone like a real blinding light on me. I pulled over
The cop approached and I’m sorry to say that he was pretty nice. He explained what I had done wrong (being in the lane next to a traffic stop), and, while not blaming me for my ignorance, also explained that ignorance of traffic laws isn’t a valid excuse to violate them.
The real problem, of course, was that I didn’t pull over for more than a mile. He said he was about to call a chopper to follow us or something (I’m fuzzy on that detail - the point was he said he was on the verge of seriously escalating when my dumb ass finally pulled over).
There are two points to this story and the more obvious one is ‘how differently would this have gone if it wasn’t two pasty white boys in stupid tuxes in a minivan in a predominantly white Midwestern town.’ And that is worth hammering home, for sure
The other thing that makes me feel awful about this, though, is my own behavior. Forget the initial violation, that truly was ignorance. It’s how I instantly assumed that there could be no way the police could be after me.
That’s not a cognitive breakdown so much as a learned impulse from my (cis/white/het/male) conditioning. ‘The police can’t be after me. They ARE me. They’re not FOR me.’ Without claiming any personal experience with this, it is very obviously not that way for the Black community
So I try to think of what the opposite of my complete breeziness about the situation is, which is, I suppose, terror. And besides the actual horrific murders committed by the police...like, as much as I hate the pigs now, I do not think it’s possible for me to imagine...
...the state and its violent arms of enforcement being so fully arrayed against you, and carrying that awareness with you constantly as you just try to go about the world. But it must be unbelievably exhausting, among other things.
Anyways, ofc the pigs do not police everyone the same, and the takeaway from my little incident shouldn’t be that the cop was nice, but that I assumed that there was no way I could have done anything wrong, and one look at my white face was enough for the cop to agree with me
/fin
