First published at 16:12 UTC on June 13th, 2018.
D.W.B. (Driving While Black) Any Town, City U.S.A.
Driving while black", abbreviated as DWB, is a phrase in American English that refers to the racial profiling of African American drivers. The phrase implies that a motorist might be pulled ove…
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D.W.B. (Driving While Black) Any Town, City U.S.A.
Driving while black", abbreviated as DWB, is a phrase in American English that refers to the racial profiling of African American drivers. The phrase implies that a motorist might be pulled over by a police officer, questioned, and searched, simply because of a racial bias.
While this video is a skit the ability for this to occur in a town or city near you is very real. Let me provide an example from a New York Times Article
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Rufus Scales, 26 and black, was driving his younger brother Devin to his hair-cutting class in this genteel, leafy city when they heard the siren’s whoop and saw the blue light in the rearview mirror of their black pickup. Two police officers pulled them over for minor infractions that included expired plates and failing to hang a flag from a load of scrap metal in the pickup’s bed. But what happened next was nothing like a routine traffic stop.
Uncertain whether to get out of the car, Rufus Scales said, he reached to restrain his brother from opening the door. A black officer stunned him with a Taser, he said, and a white officer yanked him from the driver’s seat. Temporarily paralyzed by the shock, he said, he fell face down, and the officer dragged him across the asphalt.
Rufus Scales emerged from the encounter with four traffic tickets; a charge of assaulting an officer, later dismissed; a chipped tooth; and a split upper lip that required five stitches.
That was May 2013. Today, his brother Devin does not leave home without first pocketing a hand-held video camera and a business card with a toll-free number for legal help. Rufus Scales instinctively turns away if a police car approaches. “Whenever one of them is near, I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t feel safe,” he said.
As most of America now knows, those pervasive doubts about the police mirror those of millions of other African-Americans. More than a year of turmoil over the deaths of unarmed blacks after encou..
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