"Let me see some ID!" the officer said sardonically. "Sure," I replied, and handed him my papers. He looked them over, and gave me a contemptuous glance. "I want you out of here by the time I get back!" he spat out, and then left my dorm room. "Gee, thanks," I said sarcastically as his back was turned.
A few minutes later, my floor's Residential Advisor came by. "What did you say to that police officer?" he tepidly asked. "He was on his way back to your room with four other officers when I told him I would handle it." I summed up the encounter I had just had, and he told me I was very lucky, and that I should leave immediately.
As I finished packing my bags for Winter Break, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had just narrowly escaped getting arrested, or so I estimated at the time.
As the years have gone by since that day though, I have slowly come to a different realization: that I may have narrowly escaped death itself at the hands of a crooked and racist officer of the law. There were no other witnesses, as I was the last person to leave the dorm. He and his fellow officers could have done literally anything, and then faked the subsequent police report, as has happened countless times throughout the American South. And I would have been both dead and my reputation on this Earth forever tarnished by their deceitfulness.
Every person of color in America goes through what I went through. They have a fated encounter with the authorities, isolated and alone, and they either survive it to tell the tale, or they perish, along with their legacy. There is little you can do to prepare for it aside from praying for a good outcome, because regardless of what you do or do not do, if the officer who happens upon you is in the mood for murder, you will die, and he will publicly lie about your last words and actions on this Earth to avoid incrimination. He will say you reached for his gun, or that you "appeared threatening" and that he feared for his life. And most people will believe his side of story, because it will be the only side, as dead men tell no tales.
So a person of color who has been thrust into this world eventually learns that if they allow themselves to get upset over what is happening to them -- if they allow themselves to cry, yell, scream, or despair -- then they will die that way, and their oppressors will have won. If on the other hand they take their repeated abuse as a means to learn disciplined tranquility in the face of chaos, then they will have a chance at survival.
With that in mind, here are a few things a person can do to increase their odds. Most involve preventing an encounter with the police to begin with. The first is to dress well. A lot of people, mostly white, have made fun of the fancy way I've dressed over the years. Such people have no clue what it means to be a person of color in America. Wearing fancy clothes can save someone like me five to ten stops by the police over the course of a few years, which can easily mean the difference between life and death.
The second is to drive modestly. Passing up on a fancy car in favor of a more benign-looking one can also save your life if you are a person of color. The police in this country are far more likely to pull over such people if they are driving cars that stand out in some way, whether by being excessively fancy or excessively run-down.
The third is to express patriotic love for one's country. Although I'm not too proud to be an American these days, I've nevertheless taken to plastering symbols of patriotism on my car in order to convince the occasional patrol car following me that I'm "one of the good guys". Is it deceptive? Yes. But pertaining to survival, it's also effective.
The fourth is to travel alone. This may sound counter-intuitive, but having a wife, significant other, or friend in the car with you introduces a random variable into the equation, and unpredictability is the single most dangerous thing to present before a law enforcement officer.
The above are each person's choices to either commit to doing or not. For me they have proven to be extremely effective, cutting down on random encounters with the police by over 50%. When each encounter is akin to playing Russian Roulette, statistically that can easily mean the difference between life and death. Of course, if you'd rather live a life of total and complete freedom from the above rules, you must accept that it will likely be a short one ending in ignominy, regardless of your moral composition. Because when it comes to being a person of color in America, you either live the life of a slave, or you die. I know of no third option.
I have made the personal decision to survive for as long as I can, because I fashion myself a storyteller of sorts, and as I mentioned above, dead men tell no tales.
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