Racism and a Cop Literally Cost Me Five-Thousand Dollars
During my senior year, I scratched a car and because I thought it was just paint rubbing off on their car, I didn’t leave a note. 30 minutes after I got home, a cop showed up at my door, pulled me out of my home and told me I’d done a hit and run.
I’d never been more confused.
I thought hit and runs were reserved for things like shooting and driving away or actually hitting someone with your car. I became scared. And I had just changed into my pajamas and had on my mother’s smoke scented jacket.
My white mother wasn’t home to protect me from this. To him I was one of those black kids who moved here to ‘ruin the area’.
If I had been a young white girl, scared and crying, he would have soothed me, assured me my insurance would cover it and take my information.
He left me on my front porch, shaking and crying and thinking I was heading to jail.
In the days leading up to the court date, I was assured that the judge would laugh it off and take it to the insurance. Jail time for a scratch for a high schooler who didn’t even have a speeding ticket? Everyone in my white town laughed because it sounded so ridiculous. They were not laughing after I came back from my first court date with another one.
The family demanded five thousand dollars to buy a new car because the insurance would ‘junk’ theirs because it was so old. Five thousand dollars to have the paint fixed and to buy a new car. Five thousand dollars coming from a high school student.
It was five thousand dollars or jail.
My family coughed up the five thousand dollars to keep me out of jail and let me go to college. If you think they would throw a white high school student in jail or demand five thousand dollars from them you are wrong. That’s five thousand dollars I could have used for college. Five thousand for books. Five thousand for dorm fees.
All because a cop thought I was ‘One of the bad ones’.
If you wanna donate to me, cool. If you don’t, whatever. The things here is it’s another story to show of a cop’s racism affecting black people is not limited to just killing them. If I had gone to jail, if I didn’t have parents willing to help, if I didn’t have the ability to go to my six court dates, that would have been game over for me. It would have ruined my life.