Unfiltered Story #395849

When I worked in an airline call center, we all got to know each other pretty well and we would sit around the lunch area and chat about all kinds of things. We especially got to know the people who were in our initial training class. One day a group of us were sitting around a table in the lunch area talking. 3 of us were white, one was black. He was the one from my training class. One of the others mentioned that the day before she had gotten a warning at a stop sign near our workplace that was notorious for people running the stop sign and being caught. We all sympathized and then my black co-worker spoke up.

B. Co-worker – Yeah that happened to me a few weeks ago except I got a ticket instead. And they wanted to search my car too. So I let them

Me: Why did you let them do that? You should have said no when they asked.

B. Co-worker: Well (me) I didn’t want to have any problems.

And he just left it at that. This co-worker was a nice, soft spoken, young man. He did have longish hair and a beard but nothing to me screamed “troublemaker”. It didn’t occur to me until later (I was fairly naive at that time) that because he was black, he was probably afraid he would have police trouble if he didn’t go along with what they wanted. This happened in a state that is considered to be progressive in most ways so it was a bit shocking that even there black people might have problems with police.