Driving While B(l)ack in America

“By yourself?” is the most frequent question I get about my 2019 travels. More than “how much did it cost?” or even “what countries did you visit?” People seem fixated on the alone part. The part I don’t think much about.

It isn’t that I haven’t experienced dangerous situations in my travels, or that nothing bad has happened to me, just that I don’t equate those things with the solitary nature of my travels. Bad things happen every day to people alone and in groups. Misfortune is not tethered to folks walking through life alone. So my worries when I travel, my stresses, are mostly the same as the ones I have in America.

One thing I didn’t worry much about in my travels was interactions with the police. But that was there, this is America and police interactions are a different breed of

Staring at what I thought was a low hanging orange moon in the distance, I ran a stop-sign I've stopped at a million times. When I saw the flashing lights I was genuinely confused. I wasn’t up to speed yet. I had swerved a little wide getting in my lane but that didn’t feel excessive.

Mind racing, I put on my blinker and headed to the curb. I fumbled with my radio, started to reach for my purse, then remembered I’m Black and in America and rolled down my window, turned off the car and put my hands at 10 and 2.

My heart raced.

The last time I was pulled over I was in Oakland and got a $300 ticket for dropping someone off at the bus stop of a BART station (no good deed goes unpunished). The cop was as gracious as anyone handing you a $300 bill can be but that was before the spate of recorded black deaths at the hands of police officers so fear wasn’t at the forefront of my mind at that time. I think it was even before Oscar Grant’s murder was preserved in grainy phone video that was cutting edge at the time.

It has been so long since I’ve bee pulled over that I didn’t anticipate how fearful I would feel when I saw the flashing lights and prepared for what should be a routine interaction. Only it didn’t feel routine. It felt fraught.

To be clear, neither cop was rude to me – but there were two of them. The first approached as I'd expected, the second one walked up a few minutes into the stop, knocked lightly on the passenger window, and asked to lower it so he could inspect my car.

No one yelled at me, asked intrusive questions, and I drove away with only a warning.

Still, my heart raced in my chest as I accelerated away from the curb and merged left to enter the freeway. My mind raced, listing all of the things I forgot to do. I hadn’t put on my hazards, I hadn’t thought to record the interaction. If this had gone differently there was nothing to show how accommodating I was, how quickly I complied with requests, how formal my posture.

Sitting on my bed at 2:15 am, my mind still racing, I can’t believe those are the things I focused on...only I can believe it. And it is the ease with which I have slunk back into this very specific American reality that frightens me.

I shouldn’t have run the stop sign, but I shouldn’t fear for my life when being reprimanded for it.

Note: This happened back in early January and I just never posted. This fear hasn't receded.