[white] boys will [get away with] be[ing white] boys
This was first written in October 2018, and finished and published in April 2020. The desire to revisit and finish this reflection came thanks a peer’s social experiment to comparatively define “whiteness” from the perspective of white and non-white people in concurrent Facebook posts. You can view them here: White | Black+POC
A couple days ago, I got pulled over for going 51 in a 25 on a winding, residential road in rural Wisconsin.
I was in my grandma’s old Toyota Corolla, rushing to go on a short hike before the sun set, when I saw a nondescript black SUV light up with red and blue behind me. I pulled over; he pulled up behind me and then, without warning, proceeded to pull up alongside me. He rolled down his window. I did the same.
A middle-aged white man peered down on me. After pausing to let the moment sink in, he took on a well-rehearsed paternal tone and began rhetorically asking me, “Do you know how fast you were going?…Can you afford to pay the $600 ticket I can issue you right now?…Did you take a moment to consider the families that live along this road?”
On the inside, my heart was racing and my mind was frantically running through all of the scenarios presented to me — the truth was that I didn’t have the $600 and I sure as hell couldn’t afford to lose my license. But on the outside, I kept calm. I knew what was happening and I knew what to do. I knew this waltz; I let him lead.
I had been trained and effectively learned how to respect authority by now. My middle-working class upbringing and rigid behavioral conditioning through sports had given me the skills I needed for this situation, while my fair share of run-ins with authority had given me the practice. So I silently sat in that little old car, conveying a pained and remorsefully attentive expression, while trying to balance the tension between maintaining eye contact and avoiding confrontation.
Once finished with his lecture, he maintained his gaze and paused again, half waiting for dramatic effect and half waiting to see my reaction. I took my cue and gave him the gratification of a sincere and sullen apology, “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t realize how fast I was going. That was irresponsible and dangerous of me.” I deftly let the silence settle back in to indicate that it was his turn.
Satisfied with my response, he gave me one last stern, disapproving look and then gestured for me to drive off without running my plates or asking for my license. Our dance ended and I went off to enjoy my hike.
On September 4th — the day before the Laquan McDonald murder trial was set to begin — I was in the suburbs of Chicago, visiting with my dad’s side of the family.
After a feast of unlimited salad, soup and breadsticks at Olive Garden, my dad, uncle and I ended up back in my Nana’s kitchen. A family of middle-upper class, white suburbanites, they naturally had an opinion on the matter.
My dad, a rigidly-minded, yet subtle Fox News mouthpiece, and my uncle, a Rachel Maddow-loving, soft-hearted liberal, were at the center of the discussion. They naturally differed on gun regulation and police accountability and, for a while, I didn’t think it was worth weighing in on an irreconcilable issue. That was until they came to the agreement that Chicago’s Black communities needed increased self-accountability.
The version of me that was raised fully-immersed in class, race and geographic privilege, apathetic and ignorant to structural racism, probably would have nodded and echoed the consensus a decade ago. But the current version of me, who had spent five years living and working in predominantly black and brown communities in Chicago, Boston and Detroit, felt it imperative to weigh in.
Amid the you know what they need to do’s and the if they would just’s, I contributed insights from my lived experiences, in an attempt to introduce nuance and complexity, to shift perspectives and change minds, but my efforts amounted to little. At the end of the day, these were two old white men who just wanted to hear themselves talk. Eventually, the conversation expanded to be inclusive of the national discourse on police violence; that’s when my dad went there.
My dad invoked the trope of framing victims of police violence as deviants — and called Mike Brown “a thug”. He proceeded to justify Mike’s death because of the narrative that had been constructed around him by media reports and commentators, even going as far as to tie-in and justify Trayvon Martin’s death because “George Zimmerman had to protect himself.”
When my father began his character assault on those teenagers, I was taken aback and caught in disbelief. Not because of the same exhaustive talking points that had been in circulation for years, but because of the logic that had confidently brought my father to these conclusions. According to him, the deaths of Laquan, Mike and Trayvon were justified because of the poor decisions and mistakes that they had previously made as young men.
I stood across from my dad as someone who, by that justification, deserved to die at the hands of police officers long ago.
My rap sheet is long.
It includes moving violations, petty theft, underage drinking, driving under the influence, trespassing, driving without a license, disorderly conduct, public intoxication, plagiarizing and cheating on school tests and projects, vandalizing private property, tailgating undercover cops, in-school suspensions in 1st grade and 6th grade, getting banned from the 8th grade class trip for countless visits to the principal’s office, riding around and hooking up with underage girls in my car when I was 18, and even getting charged with a felony at 23. I’ve lost count of the times I have been confronted by authority figures as a deviant offender.
I’ve also lost count of the times I’ve gotten off without formal charges or significant repercussions. Save for a few moving violations, twice as many parking tickets and the dismissed felony charge that shows up on background checks, I’ve essentially gotten away with it all.
I don’t think we need to mince words about why either. It’s because of my privilege, because of my skin color, my education, and the pleasant suburban cops that I dealt with in the stable suburban community where I grew up. It’s living in a world that was designed by people who look like me to preserve power and status over people who don’t. All of those things allowed me to build character rather than a criminal record over the course of my young life.
For example:
When I called 9–1–1 on the rotary phone in my grandparent’s basement on my grandma’s 60th as a six year old, I was supposed to be reprimanded. Instead, I got to sit in one of the three squad cars that showed up and try running the siren.
When I got caught underage drinking my sophomore year, I was supposed to be arrested, processed and suspended for a quarter of my upcoming football season. Instead, the police called and handed me over to my parents. Likewise, my track coach (and varsity offensive coordinator) claimed that I didn’t run in the conference or state meets — neither of which I had qualified to compete in — and I got to play my entire junior football season. He even hired me as coach a few years later.
When I tailgated the undercover cop and got caught after a high speed chase, I was supposed to be arrested, charged and convicted. Instead, the detective gave me his business card and said there was a $200 reward for successful tips on car stereo theft and drug dealers. My friend who was riding shotgun had a younger brother who sold weed — I had the audacity to turn to him and ask him if we should try to make 200 bucks.
I think you get the frustrating, mind-numbing point. I grew up in a world of such unbridled systemic privilege, in a system that gave me the benefit of the doubt and worked to my benefit. It was a system that didn’t hold me accountable and left me ignorant.
That was until karma caught up with me…
…and I woke up in a vomit-covered t-shirt and my boxers, while my Miranda Rights were being read to me at a police station in rural Massachusetts when I was 23.
It took a few days to gather the details of what had happened and a few months before the felony charges were dismissed, but my Black coworker had ended up lost at someone else’s home and been profiled as an intruder, before being arrested and falsely charged with attempted breaking and entering that night. As his blacked-out drinking buddy earlier in the evening, I was marked his accomplice and forcibly removed from my bed an hour after his arrest. The vomit came from me throwing up all over myself in the back of the squad car on the way to the station.
I spent that entire night handcuffed to a wall in an interrogation room with nothing more than a cup of water (and some clean clothes that my AmeriCorps supervisor had brought me) before being brought to the courthouse to be arraigned the next morning. There was a break at 5am where an officer came and took me outside to clean my vomit out of the back of his car with a hose. The naive, little, former football player in me thought this retributive punishment would be my disciplinary lesson for the night, but I had yet to realize that my privilege wouldn’t extend this far. He took me back to the room and handcuffed me back to the wall once I had done a satisfactory job.
My coworker and I were brought to the courthouse a few hours later and placed together in a holding cell, while we waited for our case to be brought before the judge. As I remember it, he spent the entire time pacing back-and-forth, frantically contemplating about how his life might be ruined, while I laid on the bench nursing a headache brought on by my hangover and the fall I had taken out of my top bunk bed before being arrested. We were both brought in front of the judge just before noon, shuffling along the courtroom floor in handcuffs, shackles and our socks.
Months later, my ultimate karma and lesson in the absence of privilege came when my coworker got to keep his job, while my future employer marked me as a liability and unexpectedly rescinded their job offer a week before I was set to begin it, spiraling me into a long, redemptive journey of chronic unemployment and financial instability.
And it wasn’t until I stood there in my Nana’s kitchen years later, listening to my dad confidently assert his opinion about the lack of character in young Black men, that every one of my indiscretions shared above came full circle and I understood my privilege.
Did my dad realize how much of the rationale and evidence he shared about his stance applied to me as well? If he did, would he care? Would his opinion change?
As I drove home that evening, I wondered what kind of mental gymnastics my dad would have had to go through to justify my coworker’s death and demand justice for mine, if things had gone differently and some hyper-vigilant cop had pulled his gun on us that night in rural Massachusetts.
My dad is a few years older than Brett Kavanaugh.
Their class, education and life experiences are markedly different, but they still grew up in the same John Hughes’ era of unchecked white male privilege. By my assessment, they hold that same cognitive dissonance around actions, responsibility and accountability in their own lives and the lives of others. The same cognitive dissonance that just about every white boy in this country grows up with.
When I watched Kavanaugh’s testimony last week, I believed him. I believe that he earnestly did not feel guilty or responsible for the transgressions he committed as a teenager. Why? Because he grew up in a world which believed and reinforced that [white] boys will be [white] boys, because he grew up in a system, community and society that did not require him to be self-aware, responsible and accountable for his actions. Neither did my dad. Two generations later, neither did I.
This is an attempt to hold myself accountable and to break that cycle of privilege and ignorance that I benefited from growing up. It took my experience as collateral damage of our legal system’s discrimination against a Black male peer and my dad’s racism for me to realize this, but hopefully it wont take as much for any of white male peers to do the same.
Until white men like me take ownership of how we benefit from a legal system designed to protect us over others, we won’t move the needle on the structural change required to allow Black boys to grow up with the same, non life-threatening relationship to authority that we’ve been granted.
If I had grown up Black, I wouldn’t have been afforded the same grace and forgiveness as a troublemaking juvenile. I would be trying to overcome a criminal record and potentially cycling in-and-out of jail today, and you can bet that some old white man would be standing around justifying it.
Oh, I would have definitely gotten that $600 speeding ticket in rural Wisconsin too.
If my personal story wasn’t enough or if you want to ruminate on this topic from a broader, more abstract perspective, check out this short film for the song “Sue Me” by Wale, which explores a world where the paradigm is flipped and poor, disenfranchised white people are subjected to a world framed by Black Privilege.
