I Benefited From White Privilege. Now Let’s Make It Go Away.

My life may have turned out very differently if I was not white. I’ve thought about this a lot over the past six years. Maybe I should’ve been thinking about it for a lot longer.

The Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson was my personal awakening that something was fundamentally wrong with policing in this country. I was 9 years old when the Rodney King tape first surfaced, so it’s not like this should have been some huge surprise. But for the intervening two decades, I believed that the bad cops were the proverbial bad apples. I was wrong.

Even in the wake of Rodney King, as a child, I was led to believe that racism was an LAPD issue, and not a national issue. Sure, the cops in LA, and NYC, were bad and racist, but that didn’t translate to the rest of the country. Certainly the cops in our neck of the woods where I grew up in Connecticut were good people. Right?

I think back personally to one particular moment in my life, in December 1998, when I was a 16-year old high school senior. My friends and I spent a Friday night drinking Bud Ice (good Lord, why?) and went out to play laser tag. When we were done, me and another friend drunkeningly ran back to the truck we came in to drink more Bud Ice in the parking lot. Why we couldn’t wait a few minutes, I’ll never know.