Article March 7, 2011 Issue

From racial profiling to ‘You are my brother’

By Kwadjo Boaitey

First appeared as a web original on January 16, 2005

As the white police officer screamed at me, I thought, I am not going to let you make this mistake.

He had pulled me over in this mostly white, upper-middle-class US neighborhood because I was driving without my headlights on. I’d forgotten to switch them on, and I assumed he was just going to give me a warning. But when he reached my car, he told me he smelled drugs and that he wanted to search my car. (There were no drugs in my car.)

Unfortunately, this is a common scenario. Over the years, I’ve been stopped many times under similar pretexts. To me, an African American, it’s racism and racial profiling.