Almost every Black person that I know has a racial profiling story. I do not think that means we make more excuses than everybody else-we might just be more attuned to games people play-out of necessity. Sometimes the games can be fairly innocuous. Occasionally, though, they can be deadly if we get into that “I’m an American just like everybody else and I have my rights” stance. Under certain circumstances, we will be DEAD right.
I cannot speak for everybody else who gives voice to their profiling story, but I for one do not speak from a place of hatred. I have a love for all humanity. Not only love for my people, but love for my fellow man. That is MY paradigm. Let me explain. I have always been an avid reader and as a pre-teen I wanted a library card. I grew up in a small town where you had to jump through hoops to get one: you had to get your parents to prove they were residents of the town for a good period of time and not transients. I also seem to recall that my uncle had to sign something as to the truth and certainty of my parents’ statement. Anyway, when I finally got my card I practically lived in the library. I was disappointed that the section on “Negro” history was pretty paltry, but I nonetheless read all of those in pretty short order. Plays, poems, biographies, even maps-I read them all. After that, I started reading autobiographies and the history of other people. I wept when I read The Autobiography of Anne Frank. This led me to read a lot of Jewish history. I then became curious about Biblical history. I read a lot of Irish history and discovered why Irishmen are such a proud people. I read a few autobiographies of Chinese, Japanese, and Italian citizens. So I get it. Every racial and cultural group has come from behind stories. Blacks do not have exclusivity on pain.
We Blacks, however, have stories that no one else wants to share either ownership or understanding. For instance, one of my favorite authors is Harper Lee. She wrote only one book and it won a Pulitzer Prize. The name of that book is To Kill a Mockingbird. She wrote movingly about the unfairness, mistreatment, and downright hatred of Black citizens by some whites in her small southern town in the 1930’s or 1940’s. It was actually considered pretty courageous for her to write such a book about her beloved South. When asked, however, in the 1960’s what she felt about The Freedom Rider’s riding buses across the South and exposing the malevolent nature of some whites, she said the Freedom Riders were wrong to expose the South like that and she much rather preferred the model set by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It seems as if she was disconnected from the fact that The Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King (and SNCC and The Black Panthers, by the way) were all connected. They were fighting the same battle, but just had different strategies.
But I digress.
This is my racial profiling story. Sometime around 1996 or 1997 my daughter, son in law, my three small grandchildren, my niece, her small daughter and myself were traveling from West to East and would have to pass through Alabama. We were in a rental van and were coming back from a wedding where my daughter’s step brother had gotten married. My daughter was in the wedding party as was my youngest grandson, who was either five or six at the time. It was a great wedding and we had a great time with old and newfound friends. We were anxious to get home because there were things we all had to do when we got home. My daughter worked for a Fortune 500 Company and she and my son in law were going to close on their first home the next day. The wedding was on a Saturday. We got on the road pretty early on Sunday morning, because both my daughter and I had to get back to work on Monday morning. My daughter had scheduled the closing during her lunch break on Monday. I worked for the Court system at the time and may have had a hearing scheduled before a judge that I had to attend.
We were also anxious to get back for another reason. My granddaughter has sickle cell anemia (as do all three of my grandchildren) and had felt sick all Sunday morning and we wanted to get home to her doctor just in case she went into crisis. We all just threw our luggage in the back of the van and all of our fancy wedding clothes on top of the luggage. My granddaughter had thrown up twice and was feeling pretty lousy. My son in law had braids at the time and for some reason he decided to undo them and just let his hair blow in the wind. I would not say he was speeding, but he was putting distance between him and the slower moving cars.
So of course we see the police lights behind us just as we were almost out of Alabama. Everybody knows that town, right? In the beginning there was just one police car. My son in law did not have a hat on so his hair was all over the place. He did not have his Drivers License on him (which I did not know) but he did have a valid license and he knew his number. And we were in a fancy van. The police officer searched him and then placed him in the back of the police car and called for backup. The problem? My son in law had the emergency traveling money and closing cost money-in cash-in his wallet. So of course the police officer was thinking: drug dealer. My daughter explained the situation and showed her ID. She also showed the bank withdrawal ticket from their account. I vouched for her story and showed my business card from my employment. My niece worked at a job for a Fortune 500 company also and she identified herself. I assume they asked my son in law about his employment, and would have discovered that he was in between jobs because he was the caretaker for my grandchildren because of their chronic illnesses and constant hospitalizations.
The officer called two other cars for backup: Another officer to help him search our vehicle and the K-9 officer with the drug dog. So we women and children are standing on the side of the road. The one man with us was in the back seat of the police car, and the police are pulling our wedding clothes out of the car trying to find. . .something. It was not that kind of trip and we were not that kind of people so I knew they would not find anything. We were exactly what the contents of the van showed we were: A family coming home from a fancy celebration. They pulled everything out of the car and the dog sniffed and sniffed and we stood on the side of the road for at least 45 minutes. We told the officer my granddaughter was ill and she in fact threw up again on the side of the road. After the extensive search, the police officer got my son in law out of his car and gave him all the money back. And left without a word. You could tell he was not pleased.
My son in law did not get a ticket for anything. The computer verified that he did have a valid Drivers License but did not even get a ticket for not having the license on him. He did not get a ticket for speeding. They knew the van was not stolen because they saw the paperwork. They knew that three of the occupants of the vehicle had very reputable employment. They saw the bridesmaid dress, the little fancy suit my grandson wore, the other fancy dresses, and the dress suit my son in law wore.
I call this racial profiling because if we did not get a ticket for anything, why were we stopped? Was it the hair thing? And when we proved who we were why were we detained for 45 minutes? And why can’t Black people have large amounts of cash without being suspected drug dealers? And if all three of us women were not observing every move the officers were making around our van, would ‘something” have mysteriously appeared in the vehicle that would justify taking the closing cost money? If the police had taken the closing cost money how long would it have taken my daughter and son in law to save for another house-and would my grandkids have missed out on the many years of happiness they enjoyed in the house their parents closed on the following Monday? If we said to the officers that we want to exercise our constitutional right to NOT allow you to search our vehicle would we all have been detained? What if there had been three Black men in the van without the women and children? Fortunately, racial profiling does not always end in violence, but there are always the ‘what ifs‘.
