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Power Femme
How Do You Identify?:
Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
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She
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Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
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This is what I don't understand--how can *anyone* be sanguine about this law? How can people *not* put themselves in that scenario and imagine it happening to them. And then I remember just how different things can be. The other night, on the way home from our anniversary dinner, a cop pulled up to us as we were passing the downtown police HQ. He asked if he could turn in front of us (we were at the curbside, he was in the middle lane), and told us that our passenger side taillight was stuck in 'on'. As we drove away J commented "I wonder how that would have gone if you'd been driving and this wasn't an Audi". This is a thought that only would have occurred to J since being with me. She's not racist. She's not callous. She's white, from Salt Lake City and it just never occurred to her that it was like this for non-white people.
Thank you for making the scenario visceral.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Toughy
Aj..........this is what it would take:
Sally gets stopped for not using a turn signal. Sally gets all nervous and cop gets suspicious that Sally might be without papers because she averted her eyes and fumbled around in her purse and looked around nervously. Cop decides that Sally's driver's license doesn't look authentic....it looks like a forgery. Cop asks Sally for her proof of citizenship.....her birth certificate. Sally of course does not carry her birth certificate on her person....she was born in this country, so was her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother....she don't need no stinking papers.
Cop then arrests Sally and takes her to jail....her car goes to the impound lot. It's Friday evening at 7:00pm. Sally actually gets her phone call...........she calls Mom.....Mom does not have a copy of said birth certificate and can't get one before Tuesday morning because all government offices are closed until Tuesday (Monday is a holiday....Labor Day).
Long story short............Sally sits her ass in jail until Tuesday......well maybe longer depending on how fast Mom can get birth certificate or until the DA decides she really is a citizen. Then it's gonna cost her 200-300+ bucks to get her car out of impound. And if she was supposed to be at work she may well lose her job.
Sally is a white girl and now Sally is beyond pissed at the 'papers please' laws.
The above scenario has happened to brown folks in AZ who are born in this country, whose parents and grandparents and great grandparents were born in this country.
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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