Andrew Whitaker is a senior captain for both the football and track & field programs at Washington University. He is a pre-med student pursuing a biomedical engineering degree and serves as co-Community Outreach Coordinator for WashU’s Black Letterwinning Athlete Coalition (BLAC). Whitaker earned the 2021 Fritz Pollard Trophy, which honors a college football player who has exemplified courage, community values, and exceptional performance on the field.
The UAA “Conversations About Race and Racism” series seeks to lift the voices of people of color and recognize the challenges faced in both athletics and academics at the collegiate level. By sharing personal stories, we hope to elevate the conversation about race to raise awareness and bring about change.
A Defining Moment: Police Interaction
Heading to indoor track practice one day last winter, Whitaker encountered an event all too familiar to Black men in the U.S. “I was getting ready go to practice around 4 p.m. from my off-campus house. I was wearing athletic gear and had a backpack, shoes, and spikes with me in addition to a package that was delivered to my house that I was bringing to a friend. I walked out of my house playing music and headed to my car that was across the street, a 2006 Sienna minivan with a blown speaker and high school stickers that won’t come off,” he laughed. “I live near an intersection and saw a cop car. I told myself to keep walking, opened my car door and put my stuff down. Before I even put the key into the ignition, the cop car lights go on.”
In a data report gathered by the St. Louis Police Department itself in 2018, Black drivers experienced 66.4% of the vehicle stops despite only making up 45.7 percent of the city’s population. In Whitaker’s case, he didn’t even get to start the car.
“I heard the cop on the loudspeaker say, ‘Get out of the car.’ I immediately went into fight or flight mode. I was thinking if I say the wrong thing, I could get shot. If I say the right thing, I could get shot. He told me to put my hands on the car and I stayed silent. He patted me down, turned me around, and asked me what the package was. At this point, he still doesn’t even know my name. I said, ‘I can show you that I am a WashU student and went to show my ID and he put his hand on his gun. I almost got shot for showing ID a moment after he already patted me down. Now I am wondering how to navigate this situation without getting shot.”
READ ANDREW'S FULL STORY:
