But here’s what I know for sure, and what I hope all of us are willing to consider. Whether or not those officers were hoping to be able to pull over a man of color, and whether or not they would have done so, had I been such a man, isn’t really the important thing. What matters is that at no point would I, a white man, ever have to fear as I travelled that or any other interstate or road anywhere in my country, that my color alone might trigger sufficient suspicion in the eyes of law enforcement so as to warrant a stop, even when I had done nothing illegal. That is not a luxury possessed by anyone who is black or Latino in this country — their country — and that matters.
Had I been a man of color, heading to Delaware that day for a speech corresponding to what has now become a week-long commemoration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — a possibility to be sure, given that most speakers for such events are people of color — how might the incident have differed? I don’t mean differed in the sense that I would have necessarily been pulled over. Again, maybe they weren’t looking for a black person. Maybe they were looking for a white female who had just robbed a bank and escaped in a black Yukon. But how might it have differed psychologically and even physiologically, as I, the black man, glanced into my rear-view and spied the police cruiser advancing on me at a high rate of speed? As I saw it pull even with me and then stay there? As I looked to my left and saw the white man with the badge, the gun, and the full authority of the state behind him, staring into my eyes, calculating in that moment whether I was the one, wondering if perhaps I might have a wheel-well filled with drugs, or a gun under the seat despite nothing but my skin to even remotely imply that either of these things might be true?
No matter how much money I might have, what size home, what kind of job, what beautiful and perfectly functional family, or my level of education, were I a black man in that situation (or a Latino in this era of generalized suspicion towards brown folks as de facto undocumented) everything would have been different, from my heart rate to the anxiety-related activity in my amygdala to the tightening of my muscles to the lump in my throat. And while these may appear to most whites as momentary discomforts with no larger import, imagine those kinds of experiences happening not once or twice, but regularly over a year, two years, a life. Imagine the uncertainty, the trepidation, the second-guessing of every glance, comment, or stare, made necessary by a lifetime lived in self-defense mode, the need for keen observation and interpretation of the most mundane interracial encounters made as critical to your safety and survival as nutrition, as vital as love.
See, that’s what race means, even now, and that is what (among so many other things) gives the lie to all claims of post-raciality made by those who refuse to feel what people of color are all too willing to tell them, if only they could hear. That some must contend with almost daily reminders that they are perpetual outsiders, perpetual suspects, perpetually in need of proving their belonging — indeed their very humanity — while others need not concern themselves with such things, leaves the latter with an edge, however subtle, and the former with a weighty and pernicious hindrance, the consequences of which cannot be overstated. To know that one can not only drive without subjecting oneself to presumptions that one is less-than, but also apply for jobs or loans while knowing the same, or raise one’s hand in class, hoping to demonstrate one’s brilliance to the teacher, similarly secure in the knowledge that that teacher will not ever see the hand as belonging to a walking, talking stereotype of incapacity matters. In a society as fully in thrall to bloodthirsty competition as ours, such an edge can make all the difference. It frees up cognitive space for problem solving rather than worry, and for confidence rather than self-doubt.
That advantage — one might even say, privilege — of being seen first as an individual rather than as the member of a defective and problematic group, can even be the difference between life and death. And here I am not merely referring to the way in which so many people of color have been killed by police who saw their cell phones, keys, or merely black skin as evidence of danger and shot first, only to ask questions never. Here I am referring to the way that black and brown folks who are fortunate enough not to go the way of Sean Bell, or Amadou Diallo or so many others, nonetheless have their lives shortened by the racialized stresses that flow from life lived as a problem.
Years of research about which most have no awareness — because it doesn’t make the news — tells us that the daily coping with racialization, which people of color learn to do from an early age, but which whites rarely if ever experience, leaves scars. It contributes to the excess release of stress hormones in the black and brown body, causing something called allostatic load — a reference to the short-circuiting of the body’s natural defenses against anxiety-producing events and traumas. That allostatic load then corresponds to higher blood pressure, higher rates of heart disease, and early death. The research has found that even affluent black folks have higher markers for allostatic load than poor whites, despite the real stresses that the latter contend with each day.
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