[Previous entry: "New Attack in Haiti"] [Next entry: "Belafonte Continues Tirade Against Bush"]

01/22/2006:

"Better Not Drive While Black on I-91 (But Walk Tall with the Bloody Chainsaw You Just Topped Your Neighbor With)"

...
Even more absurd, the checkpoint was run sporadically, jack-in-the-box style, because manpower depended on importing agents from already overrun positions along the Mexican border. All this was quite legal, whispered into law during the Reagan administration, green lighting border patrol agents to set up checkpoints as deep as 100 miles inside our borders. In fact, customs and border patrol agents have the power to stop and check anyone, anywhere within this 100 mile fuzzy law zone.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he winced, recalling a youthful liberal overconfidence when the legislation was passed. "Won't happen, it infringes too much on our right to travel." He hung his head in mock remorse. Or maybe not so mock.

Well, happening it was, and it was infringing me and a bunch of other lawful citizens, most notably those with dark skin. While caucasians were routinely waved through, non-whites faced more questioning, detention, vehicle inspection, arrest. William Craig, a writer and college instructor, had to drive through the checkpoint to work, and sometimes the traffic jams made him late to class, despite his anglo skin. Arriving after the bell one morning, he explained the delay and asked his students their opinion about the patrol stop. "Oh, you mean the 'whiteness checkpoint,' one of them said. The kids snickered at the real function of the terrorist dragnet. It was little more than a racial Brandenburg Gate.

It looked that way to Brenda Taite, a 41-year-old black woman living in Claremont, New Hampshire. Taite began commuting to the Vermont Law School in South Royalton in 2003, just about the time the checkpoint went into place. And for two years she politely answered the Border Patrol questions, quickly recognizing that they went on longer for non-Caucasians like her. She also saw that those actually detained in the rest stop were usually dark skinned. And then one winter afternoon in 2005, she balked. She answered affirmatively to the U.S. citizen question, but when the agent asked her where she was coming from, she said, "I don't have to tell you that." She'd been through the checkpoint hundreds of times. It was cold and dark and she wanted to get home to make dinner for her 14 year old son.

"It's the law," the agent said.

"I know something about the law, too," she replied.

He told her to pull over in the rest stop -- secondary detention -- and she was questioned by another agent. She refused to give them her social security number. A white woman driving ahead of her had been waved through, why was she being grilled?

"Is it because I'm black?" she asked.

"You want to play the race card?" one of the agents snapped. He took her driver's license to one of the trailers. When he returned he gave her back the license.

"Go on," he told her with an angry waveoff.

When she got home, she was in tears. She called the local paper.
counterpunch.org