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If you spent your holiday looking at
the internet, you may have seen a video that Erykah Badu posted to her
Instagram on New Year’s Eve, in which the neo-soul icon was seemingly pulled
over by a couple of giddy fanboys on the police department in her Dallas
hometown. “Why are you pulling me over?” Badu asks in the clip, filming herself
with a smartphone in the driver’s seat of a car. “Because I wanted to say hi,”
a police officer answers with a bit of nervous laughter. Rather than being
angry at this rude and probably illegal invasion of her privacy, Badu laughs as
well.
Blogs and news outlets including New York Daily News, New
York Post, Essence, andThe Root picked up the video as news. “Erykah Badu Got
Pulled Over By Police In Texas And The Reason Why Has Fans Concerned,” reads a
headline from BET.com. That concern is understandable if you take the video at
face value: Aside from the shady behavior of this particular cop, there’s also
the eerily familiar setup of a black woman filming herself during a traffic
stop, to say nothing of the long history of unwarranted police violence against
black people in general.
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But should we really be taking the video at face value? For
one thing, everything about it feels a little staged, from the officer’s ready
admission that he had no real reason to stop her to Badu’s deadpan reaction.
Also, it seems unlikely that a cop would recognize Badu behind the wheel with
enough confidence to pull her over. Most importantly, there’s a second video in
which Badu stands with the two officers in front of a house. She doesn’t
exactly admit that the first video was a ruse, but she comes close. “We’re just
having fun, New Year’s Eve,” she says. “I wasn’t harassed or anything.”
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Finally, there’s the fact that the Dallas Police Department
responded to Badu’s house on a call about an alleged stalker and trespasser on
the same night, as reported by a local ABC affiliate. Given the second video,
my theory is that the responding officers were fans, and that Badu asked them
to stage the first video as a joke, which the news media took a little too
seriously. We’ve reached out to a DPD spokesperson for more information, and
will update this post if we hear back.
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