This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars on July 10th 2015 a police officer in Prairie View Texas

Pulled over a 28-year-old black woman named Sandra Bland.

And she was pulled over for turning without signaling,

which is a common infraction that police used to stop people in their cars today.

This is Sarah Sejo, professor at Columbia Law School.

And the traffic stop quickly turned hostile. There was confrontation between the officer about her

smoking in her car and the officer got upset. Many of you have probably seen the footage of this arrest.

It is very disturbing.

The officer drags Bland out of the car and threatens her with a taser.

He then arrests her and takes her to jail, where she tragically dies three days later.

Bland's death was ruled a suicide, but her treatment at the hands of the police sparked

outrage across the country. About a year later, the magazine The Nation published an article trying to analyze everything that went wrong leading up to her arrest.

They focus not just on the incident itself, but her entire life's history, her experiences

with unemployment, poverty, and mental illness.

And when I read the article in the nation about Sandra Blond's biography, one thing that stood out to me was

every moment in her life where she experienced a setback happened in the context of her car, where the police stopped her in her car for a traffic violation,

a parking violation that she couldn't afford to pay, and so she sat out in jail, or because the police found marijuana in her car that she was using to self-medicate

her mental health issues.

And so for me I saw the car as this important character in itself in the systematic ways that black Americans

today, black people today in America, are discriminated against, treated uniqually in the justice system.

Serresseo's new book is called Policing the Open Road,

How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

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