To my knowledge, this is the only photo of the 1974 Chevy Monte Carlo that I owned from late 1995 through late 1998. This photo was made in central Oklahoma.

In late 1995, needing an automobile but having only $750 in cash, I bought a 1974 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. It didn’t have air conditioning, so I tinted the windows as dark as legally allowed. I drove it until 1998 (or early ‘99?), when it became permanently inoperable. It was a solid, well-performing car for the most part, and extremely comfortable. It is now part of the mythos of my time in Arkansas, including several educational incidents.

For a few of those years, I worked at a supermarket in Jacksonville, Ark. More than one white friend and co-worker joked that my vehicle looked “like something a black guy would drive”. Others used less complimentary language while saying basically the same thing. One Black co-worker told me that it was a “thug car”.

Black Cop, White Perp

One time I hit a fairly large pothole on I-30 that knocked the muffler loose. By the time I arrived at my (nearly all-black) neighborhood, the exhaust pipe was trailing on the ground and sparks were flying. A black police officer (North Little Rock) stopped me a few blocks from my house. He approached my window with his hand on his sidearm but then he visibly relaxed when he saw my face. He asked if I knew I was trailing sparks; I admitted I didn’t, but told him I lived three blocks away and planned to fix the damage immediately. “You live here?” he said in surprise. After a further minute of friendly conversation, he said he would follow me home just in case the muffler actually fell off.

I felt like I’d gotten a pass because I was white — probably the first time I ever had that realization. I could be wrong, of course. He could have relaxed when he saw my face because I wasn’t obviously intoxicated, or because I’d had the forethought to roll down the window prior to his approach, or because both my hands were on the wheel, holding my ID card. Or maybe he let me go without a ticket because he always did that when someone was obviously having car trouble. Maybe he always ignored the requirement for drivers to have auto insurance (I’d recently canceled mine because of a surprise 50% rate hike and hadn’t yet gotten a new policy).

White Cop, Black Passenger

Another time — after using a combination of duct tape and bailing wire to “fix” the exhaust — I was leaving work at 8 a.m. when a black co-worker asked for a ride home; his car was in the shop. About halfway from the store to his house, a white police officer (Jacksonville) pulled me over. When he approached my window, he didn’t say why he’d stopped me, but asked instead: “Everything all right this morning?”

My final name tag from MegaMarket, circa 1998

I nodded and said “Yes, sir.” My passenger didn’t respond. Both of us were dressed identically, having just left work: black jeans, white button-up shirts with neckties, and official nametags.

The officer leaned in, his face uncomfortably close to mine, and said to my passenger: “What about you? Are you all right this morning?” My co-worker said the same thing I’d said, but without looking at the officer; his eyes were focused on the street in front of my car. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy”, the cop said, without raising his voice, but with a little more edge to it. He was already moving away from my window toward the passenger side of the car.

Long story short, my co-worker was told to get out of the car, patted down, asked if he had any warrants outstanding, asked if he had any drugs or paraphernalia, and told to produce ID, which was called in to a dispatcher to check for warrants. Several times during the exchange, the cop said “I can’t understand you” and “You need to speak up, boy”, despite my co-worker’s speech being as clear as mine. As an afterthought, the cop asked for my ID. He looked at it, asked if the address was correct (it wasn’t), and handed it back to me with the advice to get the address fixed.

He never said why he’d stopped us. He didn’t ask me to exit the vehicle; he didn’t search my car or ask if he could.

At first, I wondered if my co-worker matched the description of someone police were looking for (“non-white male”), but then realized he couldn’t have seen us through the tinted windows. Then I wondered if my car had matched the description from a recent report. I suppose both are possible. My final assumption, much later, was that the officer had simply seen a car that he assumed had black people in it.

Again, I couldn’t escape the impression that I’d been let off easy because of my appearance, while my passenger had been targeted for his. When I started to say something to him about it, he said: “Let’s just go, man.”

The next night at work, other employees (almost everyone on that night crew was black) asked me about it — I assume he told them about it. “They didn’t search you?” “They didn’t even call in your license?” “He didn’t pat you down?” And so on. They weren’t incredulous, as I was becoming. Their faces were cynical; their voices sardonic. “Must be nice”, one of them said.

In my naïveté, I said: “What do you mean, ‘it must be nice’?”

“To be white”, one of them said.

Self-portrait, early 1996, after moving to Jacksonville, Ark.

A Nazi And A [N-word]

For this one, I can’t remember all the details; only the quote. It feels right to say it was at a nightclub or bar entrance, and that the person speaking was a bouncer standing outside, but I don’t remember those parts for certain.

What I do remember is I had freshly shaved my head, and that I had just exited my car, and that a black man was either walking past or getting out of his own car nearby.

We both suddenly heard: “Oh, look. A Nazi and a nigger.”

Conclusion

None of those incidents led me to any huge epiphany — none of them were even significant enough for me to record in my journal at the time (I wasn’t writing in it frequently anyway). Perhaps I avoided an “aha” moment because I was working 60 or 70 hours a week in those days and drinking during much of my free time. Or maybe my shell of white privilege was so thick that it took years for those moments to sink in.

In the first two instances, there seemed to be racial bias or profiling going on, but either instance could have been explained another way. The last was probably a redneck trying to be humorous, with not enough working neurons to realize he was being offensive (to both of us, in different ways).

My five-and-a-half years in Arkansas were eye-opening for me, especially my time working in Jacksonville and living in the broken neighborhood of Baring Cross of North Little Rock. Not just about race and prejudice, but about poverty, the indifference of the system, and my own limitations.

(There were many other instances involving race, ethnicity, prejudice, both the kind that made it easy to be a racist and the kind that made it hard to be. But these are the three in which my 1974 Monte Carlo was involved.)