Kiese Laymon: Blackness and the power of a college faculty ID

Kiese Laymon, associate professor of English at Vassar College, recently wrote a piece for Gawker about the power behind his university faculty ID.

"I don't drink; I don't smoke," Laymon said on The Daily Circuit. "I had cops accuse me of throwing crack out the window, pull guns on me. With this Vassar College ID, shamefully I think you can use it as a kind of shield."

From his piece:

The fourth time a Poughkeepsie police officer told me that my Vassar College Faculty ID could make everything OK was three years ago. I was driving down Wilbur Avenue. When the white police officer, whose head was way too small for his neck, asked if my truck was stolen, I laughed, said no, and shamefully showed him my license and my ID, just like Lanre Akinsiku. The ID, which ensures that I can spend the rest of my life in a lush state park with fat fearless squirrels, surrounded by enlightened white folks who love talking about Jon Stewart, Obama, and civility, has been washed so many times it doesn't lie flat.

After taking my license and ID back to his car, the police officer came to me with a ticket and two lessons. "Looks like you got a good thing going on over there at Vassar College," he said. "You don't wanna it ruin it by rolling through stop signs, do you?"

Laymon said he's conflicted about the use of his ID because "police officers see the ID and they think, 'This guy's different. He's different than his kind.'

"We pull out our ID because we know the cops can kill us with impunity," he said. "That's not hyperbole. We know that the cops, if they want to say they saw us reach for something, have every right in the world to hurt us even though most of us know we're not going to be reaching for anything."

Ultimately, he said the ID is his way of keeping himself safe in a prickly balance for black men near college campuses. As a child, his mother would often give him her college faculty ID to show police if they ever stopped him.

"The police, in an attempt to protect the property and rights of often the elite, treat people a particular way until they find out that person's relationship to the elite," he said. "When that relationship to the elite is troubled by race, we get the messed up mix we have in this country."