#28. Driving While Black

Black people are known to be primarily afraid of three things: Dogs, Ghosts and Registered Mail. Interestingly, the fourth thing that Black people fear the most is Driving While Black (DWB), or the idea that:

"Driving While Black" is a word play on the name of a real US crime, driving while intoxicated. The phrase implies that a motorist may be pulled over by a police officer simply because he or she is black, and then questioned, searched, and/or charged with a trivial offense. This concept stems from a long history of racism in the United States. The term refers to racial profiling, which is said to be used by police and other law enforcement officials."

Black people are stricken with fear by canines, the thought of an apparition or evil spectre haunting their night and the dreaded registered mail delivered via the USPS, FedEx or UPS. Yet, Black people are almost incapable of leaving their homes to drive to the supermarket because they have to turn the ignition on in their vehicle and brave the roads that are protected by agents of the dreaded "The MAN" - his police.

Like the stormtroopers from Star Wars, the police prey upon only those who are DWB and will selectively enforce in areas that have a small minority of Black drivers, thereby ensnaring our melanin-rich friends in a horrible scam that is condoned because the Black driver could have been a rouge.

Why are Black people the subject of so many of "The MAN's" agents of Black disemprowment? Rober McNeilly, Jr., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's police chief, was quoted as saying:

"Why aren't the proportions exactly the same? McNeilly, a compact, muscled white man who has decent relations with black leaders in town, says class, not race, is the answer. "Poor neighborhoods have drugs being sold, disorderly conduct, gangs, trash being thrown on the street, fights, loud music. So police will make more stops in those areas," he says. He notes that he "constantly" gets requests from black neighborhoods for more — not fewer — cops to patrol the streets"

That same article tells us that:

"According to the latest federal figures,

1. blacks are 12% of the U.S. population but;
   
2. account for 27% of all sexual-assault convictions,
   
3. 66% of all robbery convictions and
   
4. 38% of all fraud and embezzlement convictions.

With that in mind, Heather Mac Donald was quoted as saying:

"...a 1998 study in a journal called Accident Analysis and Prevention showing that in 1973, 1986 and 1996, in random surveys of thousands of drivers across the U.S., African Americans were more likely than whites to fail breath tests for alcohol..."in Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist-fatality rate than whites."

So, according to the data at hand, Black people drive drunk at rates higher than white people and they commit a disproportionate large percentage of crime:

• “[Blacks] are eight times more likely than people of other races to rob someone, for example, and 5.5 times more likely to steal a car.”
• Charges of racial profiling, which maintain that police target innocent black motorists for traffic stops notwithstanding, a 2002 study by Maryland’s Public Service Research Institute found that police were stopping too few black speeders (23%), compared to their proportion of actual speeders (25%). In fact, “blacks were twice as likely to speed as whites” in general, and there was an even higher frequency of black speeders in the 90-mph and higher range.

Yet, "hate facts" aside, cops are still compelling Black people to shy away from driving cars and instead herding them on public transportation, such as buses and urban rail lines, like MARTA in Atlanta and the Metro in DC. To Black people, solid data, empirical evidence, qualitative and qualified analysis mean little when compared to the undeniable reality of the racial nature of the facts and the unpleasant truth they might lead to, so those "facts" must be denied constantly and anyone who uses them is a "racist".

A recent study of Huntsville, Alabama traffic tickets uncovered some horrifying facts that will further impede Black people from getting back behind the wheel of the car:

"More than half of the traffic tickets in Hunstville go to blacks, even though the city's population is less than one-third black, leading a community activist to complain of racial profiling...Police said the numbers are the result of targeting enforcement in areas where data shows most fatal crashes occur, which also happen to be predominantly black neighborhoods.

The Census Bureau said Huntsville's population is 31.5 percent black, 62.5 percent white and 5.9 percent other races. From June 2006 to June 2008, the Huntsville Police Department issued 43,322 traffic citations, with 39 percent given to whites, 55 percent to blacks and 6 percent to other races."

Naturally, the article bemoans the horrible practice of Driving While Black, but then the ugly head of "Hate Facts" returns to the picture:

"80 percent of all traffic deaths occurred in the north and west precincts, where many predominantly black neighborhoods are located."We're not targeting people," Hudson said. "We're targeting areas where people are dying in crashes. The bottom line is this: Our traffic enforcement is targeted toward locations and driving behaviors that kill people."

Driving While Black (DWB) is a major part of Stuff Black People Don't Like, for Black people fear that police are wrongfully persecuting them en mass and racial profiling only Black people, a draconian practice in Post-Obama America. Regardless, "Hate Facts" once again rear their ugly head and reinforce the reality behind why DWB is a problem at all: Because Black people are behind the wheel to begin with at all.