By Rabbi Jocee Hudson, Temple Israel of Hollywood:
When I first saw the video of Sandra Bland’s arrest I started to cry. What if that were me? I was breathless, shaking, imagining the fear she must have felt, face slammed into the ground. I’m sure I would have been angry and defiant and outraged. And so incredibly scared.
But, of course, this would never happen to me. Not in a million years.
This is my white privilege. I am free to drive my car. And, if I do something wrong, I may or may not be pulled over for a traffic stop. And, if I were to get frustrated at a stop, I can easily imagine it being excused. And, I would drive away.
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In a conversation about white privilege, a colleague once challenged me with the following: Privilege means believing that you can work the system. Any system. That you can talk your way out of things, that you can negotiate, that you can change an outcome. And you can do all this with a feeling of confidence. And safety.
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A recent poll shows that 55% of Californians and 85% of African-Americans in California believe that “blacks and other minorities do not receive equal treatment in the criminal justice system.”[5] A 2015 report by a police department in California found that blacks were stopped twice as often as their driving age demographic representation, and that blacks and Latinos were searched at three and two times the rate of whites, respectively.[6]
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This summer I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me. The book is composed as a letter, from Coates to his sixteen-year-old son. He writes the book in response to his son’s feelings of despair when he learns that the police officers responsible for Michael Brown’s death and for subsequently leaving his body to roast for four hours in the summer heat on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, would go free.
