Driving while black or DWB is the “crime” of driving a car while black. Black drivers in America are more likely to:
- be stopped by the police;
- be asked to have their car searched;
- have everyone in the car checked to see if they are wanted by the police.
Some call it “driving while black or brown” because it affects Latinos too.
The cause is racial profiling: the police think blacks and Latinos are more likely to have guns and drugs. In one state 70% of the drivers they found with drugs were in fact black. It seems to prove their suspicions – until, that is, you find out that 70% to 75% of the cars they stopped and searched belonged to blacks!
I-95, the main road from New York City to Washington, DC, seems to be particularly bad. Blacks are four to five times more likely than whites to be stopped and have their car searched. Because the police see blacks as using that road to run drugs from New York. But black drivers on that road are no more likely to have drugs than whites.
Driving while black made news across the country in 1998 when two police officers shot and wounded three young unarmed black and Latino men on the New Jersey Turnpike. That is the part of I-95 that crosses the state of New Jersey. When the police searched the car there were no drugs, no guns – just basketball equipment and a Bible.
Blacks in New Jersey had been complaining for years about racial profiling, more than in other states. The police denied it. The governor doubted it. But the shooting led the state attorney general to look into it. He found that blacks were not imagining anything. Not that all or even most police officers were profiling blacks, but many were!
Nor was it even some kind of unthinking racism: the police practised something called “ghosting”: writing down the plate numbers of white drivers to report to stops they never made! They did that to make it seem like they were not just going after blacks and Latinos.
From 1998 to 2001 there was a huge burst of interest in driving while black, but little since. The Wikipedia, for example, does not take the subject seriously (as of August 2010). Neither does the NAACP these days except as rhetoric. Just the ACLU.
Yet it continues: in Los Angeles in 2004 black drivers were three times more likely than whites to be stopped and have their cars searched. In Illinois in 2008 it was also three times.
Some tips:
- Stay calm.
- Remember as much as you can: time, place, names, badge numbers, plate numbers, mile markers, billboards, etc. If something bad goes down, write everything you can remember as soon as possible.
- The police have no right to search you or your car unless you agree or unless they have a warrant. Even if you are not a citizen.
- If you step out of your car, lock it.
- For more see the ACLU website.
– Abagond, 2010.
See also:
- external links
- What to do if stopped by the police
- Examples:
- broken tail lights:
- Assata Shakur – on I-95. Now lives in exile
- Walter Scott – dead
- Philando Castile – dead
- out-of-state plates:
- Oriana Farrell – speeding. Shot at but still alive.
- Sandra Bland – changed lanes without signalling. Now dead.
- Sam Dubose – missing plate. Now dead.
- broken tail lights:
- The Green Book
- The police
- shopping while black
“From 1998 to 2001 there was a huge burst of interest in driving while black, but little since.”
All of the domestic issues were put on hold after 9/11.
LikeLike
“From 1998 to 2001 there was a huge burst of interest in driving while black, but little since.”
The Right wing scare the worker campaign started up in force right then thanks to Dubya. Outsourcing went through a seriously frienzied period, 9/11 distracted , and put the us into such a patriotic fervor that ANY suggestion that america was less than 100% perfect was roundly dismissed, We were relinquishing civil rights then, not bestowing them. Also, i think it was around then that the twit in MI sued the University because she was refused admission because of affirmative action… I think the election of George W. Bush worked like a massive civil rights U turn.
LikeLike
The white race is race of devils that can NEVER be reformed. What was insightful and should act as wake up call to all nubian warriors on the planet was the fact of “GHOSTING”, taking down white number plates to hid their devilishment. The white man hides his wickedness in plain sight and if white people are not devils then they will do until the real one gets here.
Ghosting shows that, to all my untrained nubian that whites are not ignorant this is an ego-trip for them. The devil is the devil regardless of time or place. So now the devil tries to trick us, by posing as our friends, they will take you to HELL with them.
LikeLike
..”The white man hides his wickedness in plain sight and if white people are not devils then they will do until the real one gets here…” (Africanblackmilitant)
—————————————–
This was funny.
…”whites are not ignorant this is an ego-trip for them..”
Absolutely; that’s why they are so resistant to change, in addition to the material and physical ‘perks’, the effect on their ego’s is huge, they would not know how to interact with the world, should they lose white privilege.
LikeLike
Wonderfully put, Abagond.
LikeLike
“I-95, the main road from New York City to Washington, DC, seems to be particularly bad. Blacks are four to five times more likely than whites to be stopped and have their car searched. Because the police see blacks as using that road to run drugs from New York. But black drivers on that road are no more likely to have drugs than whites.”
my bro got stopped on I-95 by police
LikeLike
Never mind driving while black! How about walking while black?:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-10-18/specials/walking-while-black/
or:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/670484
LikeLike
Racial profilling has been going for a long time in America (like all forms of racism). When I was a kid in the 1970s, the cops would follow my dad while he was driving me to school. I’m an albino, so I guess it looked to them like a black man had a little white girl in the car with him. BUT, even after they called the school and were TOLD he was my father they still did it–for years. Fast forway to the early 1990s only this time my brother had picked me up from college and they followed us home and sat outside the house for two hours! Then there was the time he was driving in his marine corp dress uniform. They signalled to him to pull over and when he got out of his and they saw the uniform, they got back in their patrol car and drove away without a word. Nobody’ll ever be able to convince ME racism is all in the past.
LikeLike
Not that you are implying this Abagond, but black women are not exempt from this type of harrassment either.
LikeLike
Not only do the police in NY pull over Black drivers, they also pull over cars with Black passengers. I have been pulled over when I am in a car with a male friend, and my car was been searched, but ONLY THE AREA HE WAS SITTING IN (at the time, I was not aware I could refuse the search). There have also been occasions when a Black male friend has been asked to show ID (although he was not driving) and patted down. This has happened time and time again…. when I am alone… no police bothering me… when I have a Black male friend in the car… police harassment.
LikeLike
I tried to explain this to a white ex-friend when SB1070 first passed. She was certain police would only stop latinos in the middle of illegal acts, but I told her police stop black people who happen to be doing nothing wrong all the time. She told me I wasn’t as educated as her, so I couldn’t possibly know how this works.
Needless to say, the first Mexican arrest happened before the law even went into effect. The guy is a truck driver that was filling up his truck, and even though he had his driver’s license and social they arrested him. An American citizen, they wouldn’t let out of jail until his wife brought a birth certificate. >.<
This kind of anxiety for simply being non-white, and leaving the house is… Well, evil.
LikeLike
why don’t africanblackmilitants posts get deleted?
LikeLike
Why should they jasOn? They are not a personal attack on any specific individual commenter. Does it bother you that some individuals see the white race as irredeemable? I think white people have perpetuated enough evil in this world to be deserving of many levels of hatred.
LikeLike
jas0nburns, abagond doesn’t delete comments about people unless they are personal or otherwise violate his commenting policy. So comments by trolls, black, white, or otherwise, get to stay up.
LikeLike
Ah, thx Natasha. I will read it.
@jujube
Even if I don’t agree that white people are irredeemable I could understand why someone would feel that way, and I wouldn’t take issue, or take it personally. Saying white people are inhuman devils is totally different. Any rhetoric that aims to paint another group as less than human is misguided at best. It brings out the worst in people.
I assumed incorrectly that someone with a blog about racism would mod out comments that described any race as genetically inferior to another.
LikeLike
As far as I can tell, he is not breaking the comment policy, so there is no reason for him to be banned.
LikeLike
I assumed incorrectly that someone with a blog about racism would mod out comments that described any race as genetically inferior to another.
That’s what’s interesting about this blog: people are allowed to bring up the otherwise unspeakable, as long as they do it properly. For the record, I think ABM is a troll and probably neither black nor militant IRL. But as long as he abides by the rules, he stays.
LikeLike
Plus he’s just so buff and cyyyuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute when he puffs out his chest and does that internet tough guy thing of his. 😀
LikeLike
@ JuJubee
im am not fighting to live in a world where ppl feel okay with hatred, no matter who it is aimed at.
So I second jas0nburns response to you.
LikeLike
I assumed incorrectly that someone with a blog about racism would mod out comments that described any race as genetically inferior to another.
Why? Why have censorship of any kind? It’s good to read what’s out there good or ill. There is still censorship on this blog via commenting, lord knows I would have loved to cuss a few out! The responses are oftentimes hilarious! Besides, if you can’t take it in cyberspace, how are you going to respond when such is verbalized in person? I for one enjoy the toing and froing. Call me bizarre but there it is.
This racial profiling happens in other countries such as Canada. Almost all my male relatives have been stopped under some pretext or other. Although the police are not allowed to take race based statistics as far as crime is concerned, they are other ways such as arrest cards, stops etc, in which to garner this information. Professor Scott Wortley has made a career out of this. A lot of people think this a figment of black’s imagination but is isn’t. Statistics bear this out, albeit derived from lesser known sources.
LikeLike
“if you can’t take it in cyberspace, how are you going to respond when such is verbalized in person?”
It’s not that I can’t take it. In fact, the criticisms ABM makes of whites are easy to dismiss precisely because their so over the top. I can’t see how any response to such verbalizations IRl would be worth the time.
Those statements have no place in serious racial discussions. Anyone who can’t get up to speed with the fact that race is a social construct should be eating at the kiddie table.
whatev (shrugs) it’s not my blog.
LikeLike
“Why have censorship of any kind?”
have you ever heard of a site called youtube?
LikeLike
Most people would never say half the stuff they say on this blog in real life, so that would rarely ever be a problem.
“Anyone who can’t get up to speed with the fact that race is a social construct should be eating at the kiddie table.”
Lol. I agree.
LikeLike
“anyone who can’t get up to speed with the fact that race is a social construct should be eating at the kiddie table.”
That is fine and dandy on safe liberal college campuses. But in the real world. It doesn’t hold water.
LikeLike
This is the same “real world” in which you claim that all women have been poisoned by the venom of feminism, is it, Joe? 😀
Frankly, I don’t think you even understand what the statement “Race is a social construct” means.
Go ahead, surprise me! Tell me what it means and why it’s less of a “real world” thing that the concept of race as biological subspecies.
LikeLike
Joe,
That is fine and dandy on safe liberal college campuses. But in the real world. It doesn’t hold water.
Race IS a social construct and NOT a biological fact. This is not a speculation: it is proved to be so.
However, what makes you think that race as a social construct is any less REAL than biological one?
LikeLike
“That is fine and dandy on safe liberal college campuses. But in the real world. It doesn’t hold water.”
LOL! wow.
You might as well have said: That bullshit about the world being round is fine and dandy on safe liberal college campuses but out in the real world we know the TRUTH!
Also, you guessed wrong I am no liberal and haven’t seen a college campus in 8 years.
Back to the kiddie table buddy.
LikeLike
Oh. Thad already wrote the same thing.
Seriously, people, words “social construct” do not mean some kind of a PC talk or a synonym for “unreal” or “make believe”. It’s real, and it often affects people more than some natural and biological facts do.
If it will be easier o accept it, more or less everything that has anything to do with humans is socially constructed, even the things that are basically natural, such as time, space, our bodies, sex (both in terms of reproduction and male/female), etc.
In terms of race, however, it’s not even based in biology like some other constructs are (gender, for example).*
*But gender itself is sometimes not based on biology.
LikeLike
If race isn’t a social construct, and is a biological fact, why is it that approximately 45 percent of “white” Jewish people and I share the same mtDNA (in case anyone is fuzzy on what that means, it means we share ancestry; we are “kin”). And nearly none of Kenyans or South Africans do? Yet Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, and I are all the same “race”?… Because people decided they were going to group those with similar skin tones and hair textures as “one,” regardless of whether biology agrees with that or not.
Funny, that.
LikeLike
But gender itself is sometimes not based on biology
To wit, Raymond Laqueur.
LikeLike
@Thaddeus
“all women have been poisoned by the venom of feminism, is it, Joe?”
I don’t recall saying that. But that sounds like something I would say. I do believe that American women suffer from extreme entitlement narcissism.
I understand fully what the intellectual emphasis behind “race is a social construct…La Ti Da”
But in the Real Real World. It doesn’t hold water. Go to Any Prison, School Lunch Room, or hell the Gaza Strip. People don’t understand or even care about Social Constructs. Liberal Elitist Do. People see Black Guy, White Guy, Mexican, Asian, etc.
I see this all of the time. People actually think by saying that phrase. That is going to make them impervious to racism. It doesn’t. It just makes the person say it feel better than “common folk”. It serves no actual tangible purpose.
LikeLike
I don’t believe in the closet racist Steve Sailer Human Biodiversity project propaganda. So biologically, I do believe there isn’t much that separates one “race” from the next.
But Culturally, there is. That is all there is. “Black” People are different from Koreans. That is just a cultural fact. We can hug each other, and say we are the same. But we are not.
I have no problem with that. In fact I love eating “Indian” food. I love that each “race” has something different to bring to the table. That should be celebrated. I have no desire to every single “race” of human wearing khaki pants, and blue Brooks Brothers Shirts.
LikeLike
Joe, so in other words, you’re saying that… race is a social construct? That it’s not biologically based but is made by society to have very real social consequences? Thank you for enlightening us! We were very unaware of that.
LikeLike
@ joe clyde
So your saying that you know race is a social construct but that doesn’t stop “real world” people from having racial bias.
When you say it doesn’t “hold water” you mean that it doesn’t matter if it’s a social construct because people are racist anyway. is that it?
Nobody said that the knowledge that race is a social construct will make anyone not racist. whether your on a liberal college campus or working in a factory in Cleveland doesn’t matter at all.
White people used to believe there was a scientific basis for racial hierarchy. (with us at the top of course). What you see in the “real world” today as racism is the lingering effect of that belief being shoved down the worlds throat by force for hundreds of years. So no, recognizing that race is a social construct isn’t going to make everything all better. the damage is done.
However, everyone still needs to recognize that race is a social construct because it’s kind of a first step to seeing everyone as equal.
LikeLike
Has anyone ever heard of “Thinking as a Hobby” by William Golding? Well, I’m seeing a lot of Grade 2 comments–ones designed to shut up the people who disagree with you and shut down their side of the conversation. I sound like a big, fat, goody-two shoes, but why don’t we all just calm down and try to understand what everyone else is saying?
LikeLike
I do believe that American women suffer from extreme entitlement narcissism.
Just the women, huh? You American men have somehow magially emerged unscathed from this cultural plague…?
I understand fully what the intellectual emphasis behind “race is a social construct…La Ti Da”
See, this is why we doubt you, Joe: because if you truly DID understand what people are saying there, you wouldn’t be going “La Ti Da” about it.
Frankly, I think that you – like many Americans who probably had their last biology class in high school – think that when we say “race is a social construct” we’re really saying “race doesn’t exist”.
There’s no other logical reason why you’d make the innane comment that understanding race as a social concept somehow puts us out of touch with the real world.
The Gaza Strip is an excellent example of WHY race is a social construct. Biologically speaking, the people in conflict there are very, very much alike. Up until WWI, they had no trouble living with each other and had done so, in peace, for more than a millenia. Biological race doesn’t explain the conflict there, nor does blood, Joe: POLITICS and the CREATION of a racialized “other” for historical and political reasons is the only thing that explains that concept.
Now, as to whether or not the common man “cares” about this is neither here nor there. The common man also doesn’t care to understand the complexities of his house’s electrical system, but someone had better know this stuff if the common man wants his T.V. to light up whenever he has a hankering to watch “Jersey Shore”. The veracity of scientific fact isn’t subject to democratic vote, Joe, and it doesn’t change one whit simply because the majority of humanity doesn’t understand said facts.
People actually think by saying that phrase. That is going to make them impervious to racism.
Ah, so this is the problem. You really DON’T understand what “race is a social construct” means – or at least the people you see using it don’t and you’re too ignorant to be able to correct them. Because no one who understands what the phrase really means would believe that it’s some sort of magic shield against racism. What the phrase DOES do is point you towards the real roots of racism, which are not to be found in biology.
So biologically, I do believe there isn’t much that separates one “race” from the next. But Culturally, there is. That is all there is.
Oh, I see. So you DO believe that race is a social construct, then. Culture, after all, is humanity’s most notorious social construct.
Joe, just a little piece of advice: before you go tossing “insults” like “liberal elite” around, maybe you’d like to do a quick google regarding whatever topic you’re talking about? Because what you’re essentially saying here is “Only those damned pinhead liberal poofters believe that race is a social concept. Unlike me: I am a practical, no nonsense kinda guy. I know for a FACT that race is based on CULTURE.”
You sound like some fool who’s saying “Don’t try to tell me that the ocean is full of H2O you damned liberal scientist! It’s full of water! Any fool can see that!!!”
LikeLike
Actually, Joe’s belief is quite interesting as it’s paradigmatic of a lot of American racial thought these days (you might want to take note, Mira). He cheerfully belives that race is a social construct based on culture, though he’s a bit confused, apparently, as to what a social construct is. What bothers him is the belief that, as a social construct, race can be changed, eliminated, created, etc.
Joe illustrates what I’ve been saying for some time now: Americans are not so much racists as they are essentialists and determinists. They want to be able to slap a label – or a series of labels on something and have that express said thing’s “essence”. They want that essence to be fixed and eternal and they want it to mean something.
So American racists are just as happy to use culture as they are to use biology to explain racial difference: what they will not accept, ever, is the concept that human difference is simply not determinist or essentialist. You can’t say, in other words, that someone is “black” and immediately descry what they eat, drink, what music they listen to, where they live, what clothes they wear, etc. In aggregate, one might discover patterns among blacks which we understand to be “culture”, but Americans aren’t happy unless they can use these patterns to define – or at least reference – the individual.
So this is why Joe is against the concept of “race as a social construct” even while he paradoxically believes race to be “cultural” in nature. I lay dollars to donuts that Joe believes that culture is fixed, singular and millenial – i.e. that there is basically ONE black culture and that it hasn’t changed in its essential outlines for hundreds if not thousands of years. Joe is using the word “culture” but what he really means is the old German term kultur, the “unquenchable spirit of a people”.
Joe, in other words, is an essentialist: he believes that there’s some deep, ineffable and unextinguishable trait that sets this group of humanity off from other groups. If we’ve now proven that biology doesn’t fit that description (and Joe’s apparently bought that), why then it must be culture which houses this deep expression of uneraseable human difference.
LikeLike
@ Thaddeus.
Well said, I’m not 100% on board with the essentialist part though. I think your right that many whites probably see blacks from an essentialist POV (how they can get that far without examining the fallacy of their reasoning I don’t understand.)
But there also seems to be this idea that black people choose to go down that road. That they aren’t born “black” in the cultural sense, they are instead joining some kind of black club. At which point they all think, feel, and act the same predictable way. It amounts to the same thing I guess. But i think it provides a dangerous out where one can still hold on to their racism and feel that they are just “seeing things as they are” that blacks have chosen to be part of a monolith so it’s ok to view them as such. Your only “really” racist if you think people are born inferior but if they decide to be inferior on their own it’s ok to see them that way.
LikeLike
Thanks for this. But is this the same for all states and the District of Columbia? I thought police were given the right to search you in some states if they suspect you of a crime.
LikeLike
A possible technical fix to the dangers that Black drivers experience routinely in USA. Not 100% sure but, worth trying. See the link,
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/30/us/not-reaching-pouch-police-shooting-race-traffic-trnd/index.html
LikeLike