Racial Profiling

The lecture video, “The Pathology of White Privilege,” by Tim Wise shares some interesting and also shocking information. What I found to be the most accurate, only because I have experienced it firsthand, was the racial profiling section of his lecture. Wise gives an example of snap racist judgments by comparing what a police officer might think in different situations. He says, for the most part, if a police officer sees a black person driving a nice car in a good neighborhood they must be a drug dealer and if we change the scenario and place a white person in that drivers seat it automatically must be a spoiled rich kid. This is a really good point he brings up because this happens more often than we might think. For example, I grew up in a northwest suburb of Chicago in an affluent neighborhood where the majority of teens drove luxury cars. Some teens, like me, saved up (not very much) but bought my first car, a 94’ Honda accord. My car had purple tints, a noisy muffler, and was a little rusty but it got me from A to B. The only problem was that my car stuck out like a sore thumb in my neighborhood. Since I had purple tints it was hard to see who was inside the car. I would continuously get pulled over for any reason possible, but once the officer saw it was a young white girl it almost always resulted in a warning. This is just one example of how I believe racial profiling still exists today. I think that most of the police officers pulled me over because they suspected to find me breaking the law in someway based on their racial stereotypes. If we changed the scenario and placed a black person in my car would it have gone a different route? What could have possibly happened differently? What types of racial profiling experiences have you encountered?