i enjoy watching a white man get frisked

10 PM on a saturday night. 


my permanent roommate (PR) and i were driving back to our hotel after hanging out at a local microbrewery and having one beer each. PR was driving. he made a right turn onto a frontage road leading to the highway, and immediately our car was flooded with that unmistakable red + blue light. 


PR pulled over and we looked at each other. neither of us had any idea why a cop would stop us. we waited for the officer to approach the window. the officer- a baby-faced, pink-cheeked guy with closely cropped blonde hair- addressed PR as "man", as in, "ok, man, i just need to see your license + registration." he had PR follow his pen with his eyes. then he asked PR to step out of the car. he patted him down and had him walk the line while counting out loud.


i am terrified of cops b/c i hate their near-absolute power- their version of what happened carries much more weight than any words i can come up with. so part of my brain was racing, trying to guess how much it would cost to bail PR out of jail, and whether it would max out my credit line.


another part of me, however, was gratified by the fact that PR is a clean-cut, caucasian male. i suspect that for many Americans, when they hear the word "criminal", the face of a person of color, probably male, pops into their minds. we live in a country where people are still found "guilty of being black [or latino, or asian]". i exulted in every car that drove past us and i wanted to yell: "look at this white guy who's getting frisked! he must have done something bad! he must be dangerous!"


all of which is unfair to PR, who, understandably, did not enjoy this experience at all, and had not committed any crimes beyond weaving outside of his lane twice, according to the officer (neither of us remembers noticing this). but i'm enamored by the possibility that maybe one of the passengers in one of the passing cars was a kid, and that maybe the next time this kid heard someone  talking about a crime that had been committed, his brain would flash back to this night's image: a white man in the glare of a cop's maglite, slowly following a white line painted on the ground.