Kamala, John Lewis, and My Experience Driving While Black
"Blackchain" is a personal newsletter by Kyle Hill. My goal to share stories, articles and ideas that help promote greater equity, justice and financial security for Black people in America.
My father is black, my mother is white. I was born in Southern California but grew up in the great swing state of Ohio. I still root for the Buckeyes the always yell “O-H” to every person I see wearing scarlet and gray. Most of my high school leaned Right, and most of my college leaned Left. I voted for Obama (in Ohio) for my first election, and a lot has changed since a black man left the Oval Office. Where shall we begin?
In recent weeks, millions of people have taken to the streets in support of Black Lives Matter and to protest the killings of unarmed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Jacob Blake, and many others. The killings continue week after week, but they are constantly being overshadowed by the 180,000 Americans who have died of a virus our President still ignores. Over 1,440 people are still dying every day, and we haven’t even had time to mourn these awful and confusing police shootings. Black America is already in so much pain, but the wounds caused by losing our loved ones to senseless police violence are the most painful.
Frustrations of systemic problems of unequal justice have exploded into violence. Main Street has been decimated. Americans are more unhappy than they’ve been in the past 50 years. Schools and colleges are moved online, NCAA games are canceled, all major sports are canceled or postponed, and dense cities like the SF Bay Area and NYC are evacuating to warmer climates before the winter. Over 30% of Americans are unemployed, and that might be as high as 50% if we remove the gig economy jobs like Uber drivers and AirBnb hosts. The stock market is being propped up by trillions of dollars in stimulus loans from the FED while the US economy shrinks 30% (over $2 trillion) in less than a quarter. The FED’s only answer to the woeful economy is to increase prices (inflation) to keep stock prices high.
Instead of building a national plan to stop the virus, the President takes over control of US Postal Service and starts removing up to 600 mailboxes per day in a public effort to influence the outcome yet another election. Our democracy is being shaken at its roots and MAGA is planning on 4 more years of employment.
This upcoming election is a battle for the soul of America, and I believe Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have what it takes to save our country. The only way forward is Black, and it’s time to put proven leaders in the White House.
Donate or Volunteer for Biden/Kamala
Driving While Black
We’ve probably all heard the saying: “driving while black is a crime”. Unfortunately, it’s far too accurate. Over 751 people have been killed by police in 2020, and blacks are being killed by the police at 3X the rate of their white counterparts. Over 99% of black killings by police result in no charges, and even less are found guilty. Any black person you know or believe to be successful, there were hundreds just like him/her with the same potential that were gobbled up by an unfair system.
I credit much of my success today to my parents who valued education. I was fortunate that they were financially stable enough to send me to a private high school, Columbus Academy, in Gahanna, Ohio, thanks to some subsidized grant funding from some wealthy black alumni. I had to sustain a roughly 3.5 GPA to keep my scholarship, and it was one of the hardest curriculums in the state. But I couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble with the police. I was pulled over by police nearly a dozen times in less than four years—in and around the suburbs of Columbus. I never told my friends, teachers or family because I was embarrassed and didn’t want them to assume I was a criminal.
I started recording every stop, and here were a few:
Tinted windows
Missing front license place
License plate too dirty
Not wearing a seatbelt
Smelled weed in my car
One broken head light
Going 40 mph in 25mph
Failure to stop fully at stop sign
Did not yield to pedestrian
Driving on the double yellow line
Parked too far from curb (towed)
My car looked suspicious
Texting while driving
Gaslighterts will say “Well, if you don’t do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. Were you breaking the law?” To which I always reply, “Yea, probably.” I was most certainly breaking the law in one or more of those stops. That’s not the issue. For every Kyle out there, there was a young white teen making all the same dumb infractions (or worse) and not paying any of the consequences. We all really know why I was their favorite target. I was very black. I was the outspoken captain of my soccer and basketball teams. I had an afro or corn rows depending on my mood. I sometimes dated the rich white girls at my school who had a lot to lose. I did backflips off the diving boards at the New Albany Country Club. I installed two 18-inch sub speakers on my car with a gold spoiler with tinted windows. My mother finally drew the line with my personalized license plate, but she knew inside it didn’t matter. I was a target with or without the flare. I even got pulled over in our purple mini van one time with all my black friends inside. My father tried to file multiple complaints against the Gahanna and New Albany Police Departments for harassment, and of course they just sent us in circles. No one felt like it was a problem.
I seriously had to “tone it down”. I couldn’t be myself any more. I had to cut my hair, talk in a higher voice, and sometimes wear fake glasses just to make cops feel less threatened when they pulled me over. I even told one officer “my mom is white” as soon as he pulled me over, just so he didn’t think about hurting me. If you think I’m joking, I’m not. The more I drove around looking some someone who cops stereotype as a thug or gangster, the more likely I am to be a victim. My parents explained this to me, and I started to change my look, appearance and dress to look more white.
Many years later, I adopted a German Shepherd and I often bring him driving and imagine how I would talk up the K9 unit if I ever got pulled over. You have to be ready to disarm any situation with the police, or they might start shooting.
I was accepted into Pomona College, ranked #1 college in the country. At times it felt like I had to work harder than most of my white peers to get there, and even harder than my white peers to survive there. After my first year at Pomona, I made nearly $7,500 working as an intern at an investment bank for the summer. I paid a lot of it back to my parents to cover the legal fees we accumulated fighting misdemeanors and frivolous moving violations, while all my other friends were buying stocks and bonds. Combine that with the loans I took out for school, and I’m already about 10 years behind in life. The impacts of those casual police stops are still being felt today, but I could never prove to anyone that race was a factor.
Thankfully, students at Stanford can. I started to research some data in police stops in America, and came across this wonderful Stanford Open Policing Project where they present some startling statistics. In nearly every police jurisdiction, they found the police stopped black and Hispanic drivers more often than white drivers by a factor of about 5X in some states, controlling for many factors.
After college, I wrote a cost-benefit analysis on car ownership vs UberX (that was picked up by NPR) and today I choose not to drive if I can help it. It’s just too high risk for a black male to get behind the wheel in America when there are never any credible witnesses at stops and body cams are just too easy to disarm. For every George Floyd or Jacob Blake shooting we see on social media, there are millions more (like me) who will never truly get justice for the years of harassment and injustice by police. Today, I mostly let my wife drive and I don’t own a car (yes, I live in LA). I just take Uber, bikes, scooters, or skateboards wherever I need to go. I have been oppressed out of driving; you can laugh if you want to, but it’s basically true.
Not having this burden while driving is one of the many features of white privilege, even if you can point to one or more of my 13+ traffic stops as being valid. Failure to acknowledge the scars of this biased policing data is the root of the racism that plagues our country, and gaslighting or trying to distract the conversation towards anything else other than race is, at best, unhelpful.
Read Stanford Open Policing Project
John Lewis in 60 Seconds
By 1860, the US recorded nearly 4 million enslaved black people, or 13% of the population. Just 80 years later, in the 1940s, my own father was born in Mississippi right before the Jim Crow era in the South (let that sink in).
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, by the time my father was in college, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Hosea Williams, and former Congressman John Lewis led a defiant march from Selma to Montgomery to raise awareness for Civil Rights and to promote passing of the The Voting Rights Act of 1965 which addresses many critical social justice issues. President Barack Obama wrote about John Lewis that day:
“At the ripe old age of 25, John was asked to lead the march from Selma to Montgomery. He was warned that Governor Wallace had ordered troopers to use violence. But he and Hosea Williams and others led them across that bridge anyway. He is full of purpose. God’s put perseverance in him. And we know what happened to the marchers that day. Their bones were cracked by billy clubs, their eyes and lungs choked with tear gas. As they knelt to pray, which made their heads even easier targets, and John was struck in the skull. And he thought he was going to die, surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging, and bleeding, and trampled, victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence.”
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a historic win, but it was never well enforced, especially in the South. It was partially overturned in a 2013 Supreme Court ruling and completely overturned in 2018 on a divided decision. In the words of John Lewis, it "put a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965”.
So here we are, 400+ years after slaves first came to America, and Black lives matter is still a controversial statement and it’s not illegal to discriminate against Black people based on voting processes. We have suffered through 4,743 lynchings, with the most recent one a few weeks ago in California. Our people are not free. John taught us that American citizenship requires participation, and true freedom and justice can never be won, it must be fought for until our last breath. Rest in power, John Lewis.
Read Barack Obama’s Full Eulogy for Congressman John Lewis
Black Snippets
Chadwick Boseman Tribute to Denzel Washington
What I Learnt About Racism Over Two Decades in Banking
Kimberly Jones on BLM Protestors (viral)
Kimberly Jones Interview with Trevor Noah
How Corporate America Locked Black America Out of the Best Jobs
Killer Mike (Atlanta) Response to George Floyd
A Dark Cloud Over America (Redeeem Update)
Every Kobe Mural Location Worldwide
Michael Che BLM segment on Netflix
Mark Wahlberg’s Racist Hate Crimes
Learn About Juneteenth
These are a few of the many things on my mind.
With love,
Kyle