Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

It’s a Friday night and the sun has just begun to set. A group of well-dressed college age African Americans is heading out to the local restaurant to meet up with some friends. They get in the 2004 Ford expedition and drive off. Cursing along the road the driver notices blue and red lights in the rear view mirror. He quickly pulls over to the side of the road and rolls down his window. A Kentucky policeman pulls up behind them and gets out of his squat car; he then cautiously approaches the group while holding his right hand on the holster of his gun. Confused driver haven’t thought he was speeding is asked to step out and put his hands on the vehicle. Not long after the officer gets the driver out of the car, two more police cars arrive. The passengers are then asked to join the driver outside of the car. With no delay the officers proceed to pull off the inside door panels and make incisions in the leather seats. They tell the driver that they are looking for drugs. In a state of helplessness, tears of anger roll down the driver’s face. His father had just bought him the car as a reward for making the dean’s list at his college for the third year in a row. After more dismantling of the vehicle, the driver with resentment demands to know why he got pulled over. One of the officers then turns around and says “D.W.B” after a slight pause adds on “Driving while black”. The Kentucky police officers then ticket the puzzled furious driver and leave. Now sitting in his now barely recognizable SUV, he and his friends weep in anger. Many African Americans abuses are well documented, in the book Driving While Black by Kenneth

Meeks where the author shows many examples of abuse of racial profiling. Meeks talks about the New Jersey highway patrol and how anti-racial profiling activists have used the highway patrol in New Jersey as an example of how using racial profiling is a racist activity. In the book he gives the example of Samuel Elijah the black construction worker who was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike while driving home from a job site in Willingboro. Samuel had been stopped for nothing and was run though a sobriety test which he passed.

It may seem impractical that incidents like this would occur to anyone, but this sort