Professional status and achievement offer black Americans no protection from racialized police suspicion.

Evidence

As he told me the story on the phone later, I fumed. I had just received a call, not an hour earlier, informing me that I had been elected the next president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of religion scholars in the world. That didn’t matter. My status as a Princeton professor didn’t matter. I knew that. I teach about this stuff. But this wasn’t an intellectual argument or an example in a book. My only child was telling me that the police, one of them with his hand on a weapon, told him that his body was in the wrong place. He’d had reason to fear for his life. They could’ve killed him. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 224

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of racial habit that parallels incidents like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 2009 arrest and the general theme of being ‘in the wrong place’ that recurs in the post-Ferguson literature.