This is exactly how it happens.

A college classmate who is a Black man just posted searing memories of being repeatedly targeted and abused by our university police and of hearing the same experiences from every one of his fellow Black male classmates.

Me? I have not a single memory of *any* interaction with HUPD, ever in my entire 4 years. They are completely absent from my mental landscape of the campus.

I don’t recall anyone ever even telling me about an interaction with them, which makes sense because even though I did hang with a friend group that included Black and brown men, it’s unfortunately likely that if they’d confided in me about a police harassment incident, my response might well have begun with “Oh but…”

And this is how white folks like me can look at our own direct experience, think it is the one and only truth about policing, and shrug in honest bewilderment at reports of police violence that run so counter to what we’ve seen. We don’t realize that our truth is not in conflict with what Black people are telling us; the fact that our truth is true is exactly the problem. Because there is a deeper unifying truth:

Policing in this country is fundamentally built to protect people like me… *from* people like my classmate.