**The Fear I Have Never Had to Carry**

I have never had to plant my hands on a dashboard because I was afraid a police officer might shoot me.

I have never had to wonder whether reaching for my identification would be the last movement I ever made. Whatever nervousness I might have felt about being pulled over, I have not had to experience it as a question of whether I would make it home alive.

Many of my fellow citizens carry precisely that fear. The profound injustice of that makes me angry.

Watching *The Hate U Give*, the 2018 film directed by George Tillman Jr. and based on Angie Thomas’s novel, brought that injustice home to me. The story follows Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg, after she witnesses an officer fatally shoot her childhood friend during a traffic stop. But the moment that gripped me came before the gunfire, as she pleaded with her friend to put his hands on the dashboard. [Film background](https://www.20thcenturystudios.com/movies/the-hate-u-give), [the filmmakers’ account of the traffic-stop scene](https://theasc.com/…/the-hate-u-give-meticulously…/).

I was angry that she had reason to be that afraid. Angry that a young person would feel responsible for managing an armed officer’s fear to keep someone she loved alive. Beneath her pleading was an even deeper injustice: being unarmed offers little reassurance when the person confronting you sees your Blackness itself as a threat. You can put your hands on the dashboard. You can move carefully and speak calmly. You cannot set aside the color of your skin to prove that you are harmless.

This is a point too much of white America keeps missing: unjustified racial fear ‘is’ racism. Racism does not require a slur, an admission of hatred, or a conscious desire to discriminate. It can appear as suspicion you never question, a threat you imagine, or a fear you consider reasonable without examining why you feel it.

When white America accepts an officer’s fear without asking what justified it, we risk accepting the racial prejudice that produced it. What did this person actually do to pose a danger? What evidence supported that conclusion? Those questions cannot disappear beneath the words “I was afraid.” A Black citizen’s life cannot count for less than an officer’s unquestioned fear.

I have never had to wonder whether my appearance alone would make an officer afraid of me. Recognizing that difference made her fear all the more disturbing. The film was giving expression to a burden real people carry, and no amount of instruction about how they should behave can excuse an officer from the responsibility to see a human being rather than a racial threat.

No citizen should have to live that way.

Get it right. Get every bit of it right. Your life may depend on someone else’s interpretation. How have we accepted a situation in which the person being stopped feels responsible for preventing the trained professional from making a fatal mistake?

For parents who fear this possibility, even preparing a child to drive can carry a terrible additional responsibility. Alongside the ordinary lessons about traffic signals and seat belts comes the question of what to say about an encounter with the police.

How do you teach someone to trust public authority while warning them that they may have to manage it carefully to survive?

In 2016, Philando Castile was fatally shot during a Minnesota traffic stop after telling Officer Jeronimo Yanez that he had a gun. Castile had a permit for the firearm. His girlfriend and her young daughter were in the car. Yanez was acquitted of manslaughter. Associated Press reporting on the case.

Years later, in a separate teaching-license proceeding, Minnesota’s licensing board found that Yanez had racially profiled and prejudged Castile and that firing seven shots into the vehicle was wrongful and unjustified. In 2024, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld the denial of his teaching-license application. Those administrative findings were distinct from the criminal verdict, but they directly addressed the failures of judgment and prejudice at the heart of this fear. Minnesota Court of Appeals decision.

In South Carolina in 2015, Officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott over a broken brake light. After a pursuit and an encounter involving a Taser, Scott was unarmed and running away when Slager fired eight shots. Five struck Scott, all entering from behind. Slager pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights offense and received a 20-year sentence. The sentencing judge determined that the shooting constituted second-degree murder under the federal sentencing guidelines. U.S. Department of Justice account.

A broken brake light. A man shot in the back. A family left to live with the result.

In Dallas in 2018, Botham Jean was in his own apartment when off-duty Officer Amber Guyger entered, believing it was hers, and shot him. She was convicted of murder and sentenced to ten years in prison. Jean was killed inside the home where he had every right to feel safe. Associated Press account.

These people had lives before they became names in a national argument. They had families, responsibilities, routines, and plans. They were entitled to a future. Their loved ones were entitled to expect another conversation, another meal together, another ordinary day.

When I was a kid, I understood police officers to be people of courage. They were the people who would run into a burning building to save children. We expected them to face danger because protecting others was the job.

Where is that courage when the driver is Black?

Where is the discipline to control your own fear before making someone else pay for it? Where is the judgment to recognize that a frightened person, a confused person, or a person making an innocent movement is not automatically a threat?

We give officers extraordinary power over other people’s lives. With that power comes an extraordinary obligation to distinguish what is actually happening from what they fear might happen. An officer’s fear cannot be treated as sufficient justification simply because the officer felt it.

Why should a Black citizen have to demonstrate more composure than the armed professional approaching the window? Why should someone’s survival depend on remaining perfectly calm while being afraid for their life?

The unfairness of that is staggering.

I have been able to take for granted that a traffic stop would end with me alive. Someone else, equally entitled to protection, may feel compelled to prepare for the possibility that it will not. We live under the same laws. We are entitled to the same protection. Yet the burden of fear falls so differently.

That difference is so wrong

Why is a black man reaching into a window a threat and a white man not?

That difference follows people beyond the roadside. It enters conversations between parents and children. It changes how a person experiences flashing lights, a knock at the door, or an officer walking toward them. It takes an ordinary moment and fills it with calculations other people never have to make.

Those of us who have never carried that burden should be furious that anyone does.