By Jenna Wortham
The comedian Hannibal Buress has a bit in his act about trying to hail a cab in New York as a black man. He walks up to the taxi and tries to open the door, but rather than pick him up, the driver hits the gas and speeds away, with Buress running alongside the cab.
“I don’t know what I wanted from that,” he cracks. “Like he was going to stop the cab and go, ‘Wow, you’re fast—get in, get in! Damn, you’re so fast I’m not even racist anymore.’”
It’s funny, but also grim, because it depicts an uncomfortably tragic truth: that for a person of color, it can be infuriatingly difficult to hail a taxi.
I’ve endured humiliating experiences trying to get a cab in the various cities I’ve visited and lived in. Available taxis—as indicated by their roof lights—locked their doors with embarrassingly loud clicks as I approached. Or they’ve just ignored my hail altogether. It’s largely illegal for cab drivers to refuse a fare, but that rarely deters them, because who’s going to take the time to file a report? And once, horrifyingly, while I was in San Francisco, a taxi driver demanded I exit his car. Fed up, I stubbornly refused, so he hopped out of his seat, walked around to my side, and yanked me out.
After that last incident, which happened a few years ago, I avoided cabs altogether. I stuck to riding…
