Since the beginning of the semester, I
have not had a sticker on my car that says I am a Rhodes student and can park
on campus. However, every time I drive past campus safety in my silver RAV4, I
am not stopped; they barely glance my way before giving me a friendly smile and
wave that is taken as permission to enter. Every time this happens, I
always remark to whomever is in the car with me that it is because of the
color of my skin that I am not stopped. I have had friends counter by saying that
it is more because I look young and college-aged or because it is cold outside
and the officer does not want to step out of their warm gatehouse or even
because the officer is lazy, which is often a racially fueled comment in itself.
I think that to most of my peers reading
this post, this will be an obvious form of white privilege and I do not
disagree. If I were black, even if I still looked young, there is a
significantly higher probability that the officer would have stopped me,
regardless of the outside temperature or how motivated they were feeling. As
we discussed in class, the real question is to ask myself if I am willing to
give up that privilege.
In theory, yes, of course I am willing
to take the 5 extra seconds to stop and roll down my window and explain that I
got a new car over break, but in practice, I might be late for class or
convince myself that the officer simply recognizes me from around campus (and
the latter could potentially, though not likely, be true). Simply put, even the
smaller privileges can be hard to give up and it also gets complicated when
you think that just because you give up this one thing, does not mean that it
gets better for someone else.

I have a friend who is an RA here at Rhodes, and she is black. Earlier this year her father drove up to the Bailey Lane gate to drive through to her dorm and pick her up, and the campus safety officer working at that time would not let him drive through to get her, even after he had called his daughter. He was not allowed on campus until she stopped what she was doing and walked over to the gate to give her ID and say that he was, in fact, her father.
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