I believe that there's a difference between knowing something and understanding it. You know how you'll try to communicate something very important to you to another person and sometimes they'll wave you off with an impatient, "I know, I know"? That's knowing: I got the gist, filed it away, I don't need to think about it again. Knowing is comprehension; understanding is deeper because it comes from empathy or identification.

All of which is a wind-up to say: having grown up in a mostly black neighborhood near Love Field airport in Dallas, and having been a diligent liberal for most of my adult life, I already knew there was such a thing as white privilege, and was properly horrified by it, but I didn't truly understand what it meant, on a deep level, until one summer night in 2006, when I was spared arrest or worse thanks to the color of my skin.



The incident happened about eight weeks after my wife's death from cardiac arrest caused by a previously undiagnosed flaw in her heart. I was at the lowest point of my life. I was angry, and I was drinking too much. I'd been a tremendously angry person when I was younger, my wife made me not angry anymore, and then when she was gone all at once the anger returned, and alcohol made it active. I channeled my anger away from my kids and my coworkers and my friends. But I needed an outlet for all that rage. So one or two nights a week, instead of drinking at home, I'd go out and get drunk at bars and then wander the streets looking for trouble.



One night I was cooking dinner for my kids. I drank a few glasses of red wine while I cooked and at some point realized I was short a couple of ingredients. I turned off the stove, told the kids I'd be back in five minutes, asked my brother, who lived upstairs, to watch them, then went to a deli a couple of blocks away.



It was drizzling. I was carrying a cheap umbrella that leaked. Outside the deli leaning against a pay phone was a Hispanic man in his late twenties or early thirties insulting people as they passed by. His words were slightly slurred.



When I came out of the deli, this man said something about my shoes and my hat, and because I was looking for a reason to hit somebody, I put my grocery bags down and confronted him. We cursed at each other for a while, puffing up our chests and barking threats, and then he poked me in the chest with his index finger. I knew the second he did it that he didn't actually mean to touch me, that he was probably just jabbing at me for emphasis and misjudged the distance between us, because it wasn't a hard impact and the contact seemed to surprise him, too. But I hit him in the face anyway. He stumbled backward, turned around in an attempt to regain his balance, tripped and fell face down on the sidewalk. I jumped on his back and put my forearm around his neck and locked it, to keep him from getting up again. It was a chokehold.



I don't know how long I was down there, but it was long enough for the owner of the deli to call the cops. A squad car pulled up sometime later. Two patrolmen got out and pulled me off the guy and tossed me on the sidewalk. Then one of them ran over and put his knee on my back, but did not cuff me—a detail that didn't register until the cop got off me and allowed me to stand again, and I looked over and saw that the other guy was face down on the pavement, cuffed.



Both cops were white.



The cop on me asked for my driver's license, looked at it, looked at me, and said, "Tell me what happened." I told the cop what happened, exactly as I described it above, including the personal details about why I'd been agitated and drunk, which under the circumstances probably weren't germane.

When I finished he said, "Would you like to press charges?"



"What for?" I asked.



"Assault," he said.



"Why would I press assault charges against him?"



"Because he hit you first."



I said, "Oh, no, he didn't hit me first. He poked me in the chest."



"That's assault," my cop said. "He hit you first."



"I don't think he actually meant to touch me, though," I said, while a voice deep inside me said, Stupid white boy, he's making it plain and you're not getting it.



"It doesn't matter if he meant to touch you, he hit you first," he said. He was talking to me warmly and patiently, as you might explain things to a child. Wisdom was being imparted.



"You were in fear of your life," he added.



By now the adrenaline fog seemed to be lifting. I was seeing things in a more clinical way. The violence I had inflicted on this man was disproportionate to the "assault," and the tone of this exchange with the cop felt conspiratorial.



And then it dawned on me, Mr. Slow-on-the-Uptake, what was really happening: this officer was helping me Get My Story Straight.