How cops treat you differently if you’re white

I’ve had encounters with police that would have put me in a coffin or a jail cell had my skin been another color

Man smiles while being arrested by the police in Baltimore (Keith Allison / Wikimedia Commons)

When a white person such as myself hears the phrase “the talk,” it’s understood to mean the birds and the bees, what your mom or dad tells you when you reach a certain—the proverbial “facts of life.” But to a black family, it has another connotation. To be black in America is to live a different kind of life with its own set of essential facts.

At a young age, black boys are given “the talk” about how to act during encounters with the police. It’s a list of stage directions on how they should play their role in the “ritual of dominance and submission,” to use the words of author Michelle Alexander. No sudden moves, no back talk, keep your hands in plain view — failing to follow these to the letter can mean death.

In her book The New Jim Crow, Alexander made the case that the criminal legal system in America amounts to de facto apartheid. Despite ostensibly colorblind laws, blacks and whites are policed so differently that “equality under the law” is a fiction for all intents and purposes.

She writes of black men experiencing routine stop-and-frisk harassment:

[M]en of color must…