Walking While Black

The 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

So, does that imply a skepticism of the state?

Yes and no.

Yes, in that if the police are interacting with you, they should have a reasonable belief about your involvement in a crime or that you have information which could reasonably aid their investigation.

No, because the reality is the vast majority of police interactions in the US are brief, professional, lawful, and friendly.

Sometimes it really is a thin line.

In my country (The Netherlands) police sometimes check all cars passing a temporary checkpoint. They check if you have open fines, paid your taxes etc. When really expensive cars pass those checkpoints they verify that the owner actually has a job to afford cars like these and if the owner doesn't they can impound the car on suspicion of being paid with criminal money.

Statistics have shown that the highest "risk" group of those crime paid cars is with young foreign male drivers.

A few years ago a (black) rap artist was stopped at the side of the road by police and they basically admitted that this was racial profiling.

The artist made some fuss about it on social media, and it appeared in all news broadcasts and talk shows. People were expecting some big commotion about it; but it turns out that the majority of people actually approved of this method.

It wasn't racism at work here, it was statistics and people were fine with it. It is a thin line though, because to the people on the wrong end of the statistics it really can feel like racism. So where should police draw the line?

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever been involved with was when I went on a tour of guatemala with a group of med students from California. The kids were almost entirely children of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. They talked about differences in religion, in folklore, in parenting, in language — but one thing they absolutely agreed on was that people with light skin were lucky — and they talked about how to make their skin look lighter, etc.

It was really an eye opening conversation to me — how deep the impact of colonialism has been on those countries and how it even spreads through generations and across boundaries.

It's horrifying when you stop to think that any police car going by could end with a bad interaction to some degree, completely depending on how the officer feels about you or in general. Baring extraordinary circumstances, that officer will completely get away with it as well.

>> A lone woman walking in the middle of the night was as common a sight as Sasquatch; moonlight pedestrianism was too dangerous for her.

Mnyeah. Also known as walking alone while female after nightfall.

I used to do that when I lived in Athens, Greece. There were two distinct periods of it, because I went through a phase where I had a decidecly gender-ambiguous appearance (short hair, combat boots, jeans and t-shirt) and another when I dressed more typically feminine (think your mom when she goes to the hairdresser's).

When I looked like I could be a boy with weird hair, I thoroughly enjoyed my nighttime jaunts and I never felt threatened or harrassed. I walked around the seedier parts of town, where the drug-dealing and the sex-working happened- because that was the point, to see the night life that crawls out of the woodwork when all the decent people are safely sleeping at home. Despite all that I never got into trouble. I guess I looked like a bit of a freak so folks probably assumed I was out for a fix or something. But who knows?.

When I looked my most femme, the situation was completely reversed, even though by that time I was bored of the sleaze and stayed firmly in the better-lit, higher-income parts of town. People would stick their heads out of moving cars and yell obscenities ("Hey baby, are you making house calls? MWAHAHAHAHA"). If I stopped, like to sit at a bench for a few minutes, shadows would detach themselves from the background and slowly amble towards me, nonchalant like, until I felt insecure enough that I had to get up and march away. Every single man I met would consider it their obligation to hit on me, one way or another- tell me how pretty I was (in the dark, sure) offer a ride, offer to buy me a drink... strangely enough, nobody ever offered to buy me a souvlaki which is what I actually was after most of the time.

Note that this was Athens city in the period between 2000 and 2005, long before the immigrants started coming in. I'm just saying. Those people who made it a pain in the ass for a woman to walk alone at night? Plain, middle-class white guys in a country with a rate of violent crime among the lowest in the world.

Well anyway. There you go. It sucks to walk while black, it sucks to walk while female, also- or at least, while recognisably so.