A few days after a traffic stop, Sandra Bland was dead in a cell. Why was she stopped in the first place? Brian Encinia would tell you it's because she failed to signal a turn from one lane to another, but I believe that's ludicrous—she was stopped because of her color. As Ijeoma Oluo reminded us last week, Driving While Black is not an imaginary problem; it appears in the hard numbers of many studies. For example, one conducted by the Washington Post found a black driver is "about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than a white driver." And the racism does not end with just being pulled over but also affects your chances of receiving a ticket. If you are black, a study in Connecticut found, you are more likely to get a ticket than a white person for "the same offence."
So far, the response to this real problem has been to demand fairer policing, protection of the rights of black Americans, and, in the case where traffic stops have turned deadly, as with Walter Scott, to declare as loudly as possible that black lives matter. Yet it's doubtful that any of these approaches will see any progress in the near future. Driving While Black is not a new thing, and protesting it, proving the reality of it, and writing about it has been going on for some time. All of these approaches, which are certainly noble, also leave us in the bad position of having to wait for the police to change their ways. For this reason, it might be more productive to relocate the point of political focus from the police (who will most likely do nothing or change very slowly) to the car itself.
Because traffic violations are mostly imposed on those who use cars, placing yourself in one increases the chances of an encounter with the police. And some of those encounters can become bad.
What I'm suggesting is politicizing not only policing but also car ownership. The motor industry must not be left on the sidelines of this issue, but dragged into the mess. And one way this can be done is to do to cars what black Americans in the mid-'50s did to the buses of Montgomery, Alabama. Why can't we see the segregated buses of the Civil Rights era as the same as unfair traffic policing in the age of #BlackLivesMatter? The shit is that real. One only has to read the report by Department of Justice to see that blacks are targeted for court fees and fines that are mostly related to their cars. So, on top of paying a lot of money for the ownership and maintenance of a vehicle, it also, if you are black, puts you at greater risk of financial instability and even arrest.
In the Civil Rights era, blacks mobilized against segregated busing by sharing cars. In the #BlackLivesMatter moment, maybe blacks in major cities can mobilize against cars by using buses. This is just an idea, of course. But it does allow us to see that transportation is a serious social justice issue. If the society and motor industry cannot separate cars and racist cops, then we must start considering other forms of transportation that separate us from cars.
For example, my cousin Farayi Chiro, who is black and lives in Seattle, stopped using his car a year ago and began traveling to work by bus. He did this because his goal in life is to become as green as possible. But one of the happy consequences of the decision is that his encounters with police officers have dramatically dropped. "I used to get followed all the time," he said to me recently. "I mean, they would really follow me for no reason, and I was constantly stopped for minor things. But since I got rid of my car, I almost never interact with cops. They are out of my life."
Yes, you can be stopped by the police for Riding a Bike While Black, or even Walking While Black. But boycotting cars has two big pluses: One, it would connect with other important economic and environmental issues (such as climate change); and, two, those who reject cars could actually save money. I'm willing to bet that violations from driving vastly surpass in cost and number those from the other modes of transportation.
