My life may have turned out very differently if I was not white. I’ve thought about this a lot over the past six years. Maybe I should’ve been thinking about it for a lot longer.
The Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson was my personal awakening that something was fundamentally wrong with policing in this country. I was 9 years old when the Rodney King tape first surfaced, so it’s not like this should have been some huge surprise. But for the intervening two decades, I believed that the bad cops were the proverbial bad apples. I was wrong.
Even in the wake of Rodney King, as a child, I was led to believe that racism was an LAPD issue, and not a national issue. Sure, the cops in LA, and NYC, were bad and racist, but that didn’t translate to the rest of the country. Certainly the cops in our neck of the woods where I grew up in Connecticut were good people. Right?
I think back personally to one particular moment in my life, in December 1998, when I was a 16-year old high school senior. My friends and I spent a Friday night drinking Bud Ice (good Lord, why?) and went out to play laser tag. When we were done, me and another friend drunkeningly ran back to the truck we came in to drink more Bud Ice in the parking lot. Why we couldn’t wait a few minutes, I’ll never know.
At that exact moment, a cop car pulled up. My friend and I were then placed into the back of a cop car and driven to the local precinct. The exact details are blurry since I was so scared. The cop called my parents, didn’t charge me, and sent me home with them. My father didn’t talk to me for a week until, by a stroke of good fortune, my early application into George Washington University was accepted and I officially became a college student.
I never thought much about that interaction for the next 16 years until Ferguson occurred. It's become more profound as we've witnessed too many young black men lose their lives at the hands of police. In some cases, like Tamir Rice, they were just children on a playground murdered in cold blood with little to no action taken.
The more I’ve thought about my run-in with the law at that age, I think specifically about how I felt. In recent weeks, I’ve read more and more black fathers and mothers describing how they instruct their children to deal with the police. I watched as Ryan Clark, on ESPN’s Get Up, broke down in tears after his son had been the victim of racism near Arizona State and blamed himself for not properly teaching his son what the world would think of him.
This horrified me to my core because way back on that night, I had no fear of that cop. Oh, I was scared. I was nervous. But I didn’t fear for my life. In fact, my greatest fear that night was what my parents were going to say and do. I had gotten in trouble before, and have gotten in trouble since, though that precise moment felt different. A week away from potentially getting into college and I was in the back of a cop car for stupidly drinking a beer in the parking lot of a strip mall in eastern Connecticut.
It seems like such a childish act because it was a childish act. And it was handled appropriately by the officer. I didn’t need to be arrested. I didn’t need to be threatened. I needed to be sent home with my parents.
So it angers me to no end that we still have a certain segment of the population debating the mere existence of “white privilege” without taking a single second to take a step back and understand what that means. It does not diminish you to admit it exists. It does not diminish your successes or achievements to acknowledge you’ve benefited from being white in this country.
I’m 6 feet tall, which makes me a tall white man in the United States. Life has been exceedingly easy for me, on almost every level, in large part because of that. At times, it drives my wife crazy that just looking the way I look makes people think a certain way about me, and that’s the white privilege.
Our country needs to have reckoning over white privilege because it no longer needs to exist. It’s absurd that the same people who love to quote MLK’s support for peaceful protests in the wake of outbreaks of violence during protest don’t adhere to his most famous speech. Do we judge people on the content of their character or the color of their skin? For too many in this society, it’s still the latter.
Most importantly, white privilege shouldn’t be a privilege. My interaction with that cop that Friday night in 1998 should be the norm, not the exception, for everyone.
The admission that white privilege exists -- much like the admission that black lives matter -- does not require a white person to give up anything. It will merely confirm that others should receive the same lot in life that we currently benefit from. How is that a bad thing?
It’s not a bad thing. Unless you view whites as superior. And if the Trump era has taught us anything, it’s that the white population in this country is anything but superior.
We're all in this country together. Let's start acting like we're on the same team.
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Even in the wake of Rodney King, as a child, I was led to believe that racism was an LAPD issue, and not a national issue. Sure, the cops in LA, and NYC, were bad and racist, but that didn’t translate to the rest of the country. Certainly the cops in our neck of the woods where I grew up in Connecticut were good people. Right?
I think back personally to one particular moment in my life, in December 1998, when I was a 16-year old high school senior. My friends and I spent a Friday night drinking Bud Ice (good Lord, why?) and went out to play laser tag. When we were done, me and another friend drunkeningly ran back to the truck we came in to drink more Bud Ice in the parking lot. Why we couldn’t wait a few minutes, I’ll never know.
At that exact moment, a cop car pulled up. My friend and I were then placed into the back of a cop car and driven to the local precinct. The exact details are blurry since I was so scared. The cop called my parents, didn’t charge me, and sent me home with them. My father didn’t talk to me for a week until, by a stroke of good fortune, my early application into George Washington University was accepted and I officially became a college student.
I never thought much about that interaction for the next 16 years until Ferguson occurred. It's become more profound as we've witnessed too many young black men lose their lives at the hands of police. In some cases, like Tamir Rice, they were just children on a playground murdered in cold blood with little to no action taken.
The more I’ve thought about my run-in with the law at that age, I think specifically about how I felt. In recent weeks, I’ve read more and more black fathers and mothers describing how they instruct their children to deal with the police. I watched as Ryan Clark, on ESPN’s Get Up, broke down in tears after his son had been the victim of racism near Arizona State and blamed himself for not properly teaching his son what the world would think of him.
It seems like such a childish act because it was a childish act. And it was handled appropriately by the officer. I didn’t need to be arrested. I didn’t need to be threatened. I needed to be sent home with my parents.
So it angers me to no end that we still have a certain segment of the population debating the mere existence of “white privilege” without taking a single second to take a step back and understand what that means. It does not diminish you to admit it exists. It does not diminish your successes or achievements to acknowledge you’ve benefited from being white in this country.
I’m 6 feet tall, which makes me a tall white man in the United States. Life has been exceedingly easy for me, on almost every level, in large part because of that. At times, it drives my wife crazy that just looking the way I look makes people think a certain way about me, and that’s the white privilege.
Our country needs to have reckoning over white privilege because it no longer needs to exist. It’s absurd that the same people who love to quote MLK’s support for peaceful protests in the wake of outbreaks of violence during protest don’t adhere to his most famous speech. Do we judge people on the content of their character or the color of their skin? For too many in this society, it’s still the latter.
Most importantly, white privilege shouldn’t be a privilege. My interaction with that cop that Friday night in 1998 should be the norm, not the exception, for everyone.
The admission that white privilege exists -- much like the admission that black lives matter -- does not require a white person to give up anything. It will merely confirm that others should receive the same lot in life that we currently benefit from. How is that a bad thing?
It’s not a bad thing. Unless you view whites as superior. And if the Trump era has taught us anything, it’s that the white population in this country is anything but superior.
We're all in this country together. Let's start acting like we're on the same team.
Follow me on Twitter
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