Inequity permeates US criminal justice system

I was on top of the world that night. Just turned 16, had my learner’s permit and the wheel of my boyfriend’s car. Jack was 20. He brought the six-pack and a thick baggie of dope.

He was trying to reverse our break-up. We had met a few months earlier and clumsily ended our virginities in a dank room at his frat house, a house of rowdy keggers and sweat-sock stink, where we could always score a dime bag or a hit of acid.

Now I was ready to move on. But Jack knew of a big party in Dayton and said I could drive. So cool. I told my parents we were going to a double feature in Fairfield, closer to home. Psyched to try freeway driving, I drank just one beer. I aced it all the way and felt like a champ on the exit ramp.

We approached a traffic light, a bright green circle hanging in the dark sky. He said "Turn left here," and I woke up in an ambulance.

With the siren whining overhead, my first thought was the dope. It was 1973 and that baggie could land us in prison. I felt in my coat pocket. Nothing. Oh crap — the glove compartment.

They put me on a gurney in the ER lobby. A cop walked over and asked what happened. I started crying and told him I was a new driver and an idiot. He wrote on a little notepad. Then he asked about all the empty beer cans in the car — who drank those? I told him I only drank one, that Jack drank the rest and that I was such an idiot.

The clean-cut, youngish cop said: "Well, I won't mention the beer cans in the report."

Whew. But had they missed the dope? When my parents arrived, I was still lying in the hall, a deep gash in my forehead, my broken leg not yet X-rayed. "Dad," I whispered, "there's a bag of dope in the glove compartment.”

That was the first time I told either of my parents I used illegal drugs. He nodded.

Dad and Jack's conservative businessman father went to the tow yard. Jack’s father distracted the guard while Dad found the smashed VW, got the marijuana out of the glove compartment and threw it away.

Traffic court a few months later was perfunctory. Luckily, the couple I broadsided were only bruised. My mom paid a small fee and the accident disappeared, wiped off my record forever.

Over my adult years of assorted get-togethers, the episode gelled into a story occasionally told to illustrate my youthful badness and my parents’ long-suffering goodness. The marijuana retrieval was a reliable audience-pleaser.

It took more than four decades before I realized the role of my white skin.

Had I been a Black teenager, my entire life would have tanked. No amount of crying and remorse on a stretcher would have persuaded that white cop to ignore the empty beer cans. No chit-chat would have allowed my Black father free access to the car — which the cops would have searched anyway. I would have been tossed into the juvenile justice system and tattooed with a criminal record.

I used to think it was just random luck that I got a nice cop. But my luck was being born the color of presumed innocence and second chances. That cop categorized Jack and me at a glance and cut us slack. I breezed out of the mess I made and proceeded through decades of comfortable life, unaware that every minute — every academic success, every good apartment deal, every job offer — depended on racism.

Those party-hearty frat boys must be retired from successful careers by now. Do they, like so many, forget their own unpunished crimes while frowning on any less-than-stellar behavior that gets a Black person arrested — or killed? He was drunk, he ran, he used a fake $20 bill, he back-talked.

Each of us with privilege-colored skin must try to imagine how furious we would be living on the other side of that cruel divide. Imagine the suffocating fear. We have to tear that wall down to the ground.

Susan Duerksen is a retired journalist who grew up in Oxford, Ohio, and lives in San Diego.