Sure, I don't mind; it was something like 15 years ago anyway, and obviously didn't amount to anything in the first place.

Baltimore PD officers wear black uniforms. One night one of them was standing in the middle of the street I was driving down, and there weren't enough streetlights in that section. I was doing something like 40 in a 30, and the first thing I knew that anything was wrong was when I heard a loud thump from my left side. Looking in the wing mirror, I could see the guy in the light of the upcoming streetlight, where the one I'd last passed was too far back to show him.

So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase. Imagine my surprise when, on seeing my white skin, short hair, and slacks-and-button-down professional attire, he waved me off and went back to what he'd been doing!

In retrospect, I have to figure the mirror clipped something on his belt, rather than the car striking his actual person. But the fact remains that, had I not been white or not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Especially since, being as I was on my way home from a visit to my connection, I had a quarter ounce of pot in my left front trouser pocket. Remember, this was back before decriminalization, more than a decade before dispensaries even existed in this town; not only that, but my guy hadn't had any baggies that night, so he just gave me the smaller portions he got from his own guy, who mostly did street work. So it would've been charged as possession with intent, and that's a felony.

The time I hit a cop with my car while I was carrying wasn't a major reason why I quit smoking that shit entirely a couple of years later, but never having another few seconds of that kind of sheer terror was not absent from the list of reasons why I was glad when I did quit.

Just imagine if I were a black man, though. That cop could have shot me dead on the spot and who'd have said a word? I mean, I so obviously would've had it coming, a drug dealer doing drug dealer crimes and, if that weren't enough, I swerved my car to try to murder a police officer in the middle of it. Probably had a gun in my back pocket, or in the glovebox at least. Who would dare blame an officer of the law for doing what he had to do in the face of an obviously murderous criminal like that?

...is what white people would mostly say. But that's the thing. I had that moment of terror because I was acting like a damn fool - I could drive more carefully and just quit buying pot, and I did. People of color can't "live more carefully", or "just quit" having their skin. And there is a night in my past that, if I had skin of a similar shade to theirs, it'd be through bars that I saw the next sunrise - if I had lived to see it at all.

I don't blame you for saying it sounds unrealistic. I'd probably likewise have some trouble taking a story like that seriously on its face, except that I happened to live it, and a lot of other wild stories too. But there are far more stories that I haven't lived, and some of them sound as wild to me as the one I've just told sounds to you. That's how life is, though. The world is far wilder than any one of us, with our individual and limited perspective, ever gets to see. If we want to understand how things really work in the places and times and lives that we don't get to see, we have to listen to the stories people tell us who do see those things - listen, and not assume that they must be lying, any more than you would assume I had been lying to you just now.

If you take anything away from this conversation, I hope you'll make it that.