Assumptions

It was a beautiful mid-summers night in 2010 when I was arrested for Marijuana possession. I had attended a house party a few miles outside of Princeton in a small suburban community which was part of West Windsor township, known for its predominantly white, well off, suburbanites and top tier public schools. The party itself was nothing to brag about, more like a collection of twenty or so recent high school graduates drinking cheap beer and listening to old school hip-hop. It was nearly 3:00am when a few of us excused ourselves to indulge in some recreational pot smoking. Without hesitation we piled into Jason's Jeep which was parked on the street, after all, why would the police be patrolling suburbia at such an hour on a weeknight? No more than ten minutes later we were being blinded by the floodlights of a cruiser, who had rounded the corner only to find a parked green Jeep filled with smoke and six wide eyed boys. My initial assumption was that the party had been reported to the police by the neighbors, but not until later would we learn that it was merely bad luck this particular officer had driven by when he did.

He got out of the cruiser and without using his megaphone or issuing a single threat he approached the car and instructed us to exit the vehicle slowly and place our hands on the hood. Noticing he was both older and alone, I popped open the passenger door and took off down a side street, cleared a fence and didn't look back. Two hours and five miles later, I was being politely questioned and eventually handcuffed in my mothers driveway... turns out they had my name the whole time. When I got to the station I had my mugshot taken, and then instead of being thrown in a holding cell I was placed in the lobby where I waited on my mothers arrival, the whole time laughing about the previous nights shenanigans with a young officer as he processed our information.

Not once during this whole ordeal did it cross my mind that I was benefitting from my whiteness. But upon reflection it became painfully obvious that had I been black or Hispanic, the events of that night would have likely unfolded quite differently, much in the same way Tim Wises experience at the Republican National Convention would have differed had he been colored. For one, the officer who stumbled upon me and my friends in the first place would almost certainly not have calmly approached the car in the way he did. But that is white privilege, even when breaking the law we were deemed unthreatening and even deserving of respect. The same holds true for the officers who waited for me at my house, they were polite in their questioning, I wasn't subjected to a search, and they even apologized when they put me in handcuffs. The fact that none whom were caught were placed in a holding cell is just the cherry on top of the white privilege cake.

This phenomenon was even more drastically apparent during the resulting legal proceedings. Despite being charge initially with eluding (which is a felony) on top of the drug charges, my case was sent from district court right back to the West Windsor judge almost immediately. I was told by my lawyer that the judge in Trenton had only briefly scanned my file before writing my case off as trivial. As I left the building my lawyer looked at me and said "Its a good thing you aren't from Trenton" which was an obscure way of saying, "its a good thing you are white, well off, educated, and heading off to college, otherwise you would probably be looking at jail time." Back in the West Windsor courtroom things were being sugar coated even less. My lawyer, who knew the judge personally, had a brief one on one conversation with the judge before the proceedings began. Then, we my case was called, I was given told that the eluding and drug charges had been replaced with a noise ordinance. The judge lectured me on personal responsibly for about five minutes, saying that I have a lot going for me and I shouldn't jeopardize those opportunities by doing drugs. I was given a year and a half of probation, after which my entire personal record would be wiped clean.

While it has been clear to me for some time now that the final ruling of my case was very likely correlated with my skin color and social class. It took me a lot longer to realize that my treatment throughout the whole experience was as well. Being white in my case meant that I could be arrested processed, and tried, while not once being brutalized, disrespected, or deemed a threat.