Jessie Kahnweiler, a white comedian, tried to deliberately get arrested in order to demonstrate white privilege at work. She pretended to be drunk in public, went swimming in a public fountain, patted police officers on the back (which has been interpreted as assault and resulted in arrest before when the "perp" was a person of color) and even tried to sell drugs to a couple of cops. Number of arrests? Zero.
Read the whole thing, and watch the video, here.
Thanks to Alisha for the link.
ETA: Sorry for the humongous video. :/ Blogger's size-chooser-thingy for pics and videos has never worked for me.
4 comments:
Sad, but very true.
Suzan -- yep. :(
Angie
Interesting social experiment. I wonder what would happen with the same behaviors with various other types of folks.
Charles -- it'd definitely be interesting to do a (slightly) controlled experiment with various types of people, but people of color have been arrested for doing everything she did. There are probably cops who'd arrest a white woman under some of these circumstances, though, so it'd be interesting to get a decent size sample and run the numbers.
Angie
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