Still the Elephant in the Room

The other day a friend (it's always fun when you can count former students as friends) posted about a troubling interaction he had with a police officer after he rolled through a stop sign. My friend admitted his fault -- he was clearly guilty of sloppy driving. Here's the exchange, used with permission:

Officer: Do you know what you did wrong?
Me: I rolled through the stop sign, sir.
Officer: Don’t lie to me—if you lie to me again I’ll arrest you right now! You ran the stop sign...you took your foot off the gas and then put it back on the gas. Do you work here?
Me: Yes, Sir.
Officer: Does your company know you drive through stop signs?
Me: No, sir.
Officer: Do you think they should know you drive through stop signs?
Me: Yes, sir.
Officer: If you do it again, I’ll tow your vehicle and arrest you on the spot!

I think we can all agree that this officer was out of line. My friend admitted guilt immediately and responded politely and respectfully. There was certainly no need for this over-the-top verbal display of authority. As you might expect, my friend received many responses to his post that ranged from sympathetic to outraged. What interests me most though, is that the vast majority of responses ignored the elephant in the room: the fact that my friend is brown-skinned and the cop was white. 

Interesting, yes, but not really surprising; race is still the elephant in the room that most of us don't want to acknowledge. 

Maybe you're thinking, there's no proof that race was the issue here. Maybe age or gender are more relevant in this situation. Maybe that cop would have been just as rude to a young, white guy. I have to admit that's a possibility. Or, maybe the cop was just having a bad day. Short of the use of racial epithets, there is no way to know if race plays a part in any interpersonal interactions. But the "maybes" here are the point. If you are part of a population that has faced discrimination historically, you can never really know for sure if your race (or some other cultural or physical characteristic) is influencing the interaction. I found this phenomenon to be real during research for my academic text, Race Among Friends, and I tried to explore it more fully through the characters in my novel, The R Word.

Somewhere in this recounting, there's a so what. As a white person (and, therefore, a member of the dominant culture), I can't know what it's like to live in the world of maybe. If I'm verbally harassed by a white cop (unlikely because of my gender and age), I know it's not because I'm white. If I'm critiqued by my white employer, I know race has nothing to do with it. If I'm given the worst seat at a restaurant, if I'm followed around a store, if I'm asked for ID at the bank, no matter who's right and who's wrong, the room is free of elephants.

Although my friend didn't mention race initially, in a later post he admitted that he did have race in the back of his mind, and because of that, he feared the situation would escalate. Thank God, it didn't. There isn't much I can do to help my friend, but I can understand and empathize. I can try my best not to let my own internalized prejudices rule the day during my own interpersonal interactions with people who are different from me. It may not be much, but it's something, and something is better than nothing.