What is Walking While Black?

It's a catchphrase used to describe the racial profiling of Black pedestrians, structured as a mock criminal charge in the style of "driving while intoxicated".

Where did Walking While Black come from?

Its earliest known print use is a New York Times article from February 12th, 1999 about NYPD stop-and-frisk practices.

What does Walking While Black mean?

It means being treated as suspicious by police or civilians simply for being a Black person in public, with the phrasing implying that race itself is being treated as an offense.

How do you use Walking While Black?

People attach it to videos or news of profiling incidents, and often coin new "___ while black" variants like "shopping while black" or "cosplaying while black" to match the activity involved.

Is Walking While Black still popular?

The catchphrase kept resurging around major incidents through the 2010s, including Daniele Watts' 2014 LAPD detention and the 2018 Starbucks arrest video from @missydepino that pulled 223,000 likes.

Walking While Black

1999catchphraseclassic

Published August 11, 2026

"Walking While Black" is a pointed phrase describing the racial profiling of Black pedestrians by police or civilians. It borrows its grammar from "driving while intoxicated," and has spawned variants like "shopping while black" and "driving while black" that resurface every time a high-profile profiling incident goes viral.

race and identity memes snowclone memes catchphrase memes social justice memes protest memes

Overview

"Walking While Black" is a phrase used to call out the racial profiling of Black pedestrians by police or private citizens1. It borrows the grammatical shape of the criminal charge "driving while intoxicated" and swaps the offense for a race, making the point that simply being Black in a public place is often treated as inherently suspicious3. Common variants include "driving while black," "shopping while black," "learning while black," and "eating while black"3.

The phrase reads less as a punchline than as compressed social commentary. It gets applied to headlines, protest signs, and viral captions any time a routine activity, waiting in a coffee shop, browsing a store, walking home, ends in a police call or arrest that appears racially motivated5. The construction is flexible enough that new "___ while black" variants show up almost every time a fresh incident is filmed and posted online3.

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Origin & Background

Platform

Print journalism (New York Times) / social media (viral spread)

Date

1999

The earliest documented print use of "walking while black" appeared in a New York Times article on February 12th, 1999 that examined NYPD stop-and-frisk practices and argued Black New Yorkers were disproportionately targeted1. The phrasing had already circulated in spoken and activist usage, but the NYT piece marked its jump into mainstream American news writing3.

How It Spread

Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell used the "Driving While Black" framing in an October 31st, 2007 editorial that argued the opposite position, criticizing people who assumed every police stop was racial3. On August 19th, 2008, Jezebel published a review of the essay collection Go Girl titled "Traveling While Black"8, and in May 2009 ABC News aired a hidden-camera segment called "Shopping While Black" that staged a racist store clerk to test bystander reactions3.

High-profile incidents kept feeding the format. A Tumblr blog called "Cosplaying While Black" launched on June 23rd, 2012 to document Black cosplayers dealing with convention harassment3. In June 2013 the ACLU flagged the arrest of a 14-year-old boy for "playing with a puppy while black"7. On September 10th, 2014, police in Saratoga Springs, Utah shot 22-year-old Darrien Hunt as he carried a katana bought from a local Asian gift shop, and his mother told the Deseret News she believed race was the reason4. The following day, actress Daniele Watts was detained by LAPD after witnesses reported lewd acts in a parked car, an incident The Daily Dot covered on September 14th under the headline "Actress Daniele Watts detained by LAPD after kissing husband in public"2.

The framing hit peak virality on April 12th, 2018 when Twitter user Melissa DePino (@missydepino) posted footage of two Black men being arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks for sitting without ordering5. The tweet pulled roughly 163,000 retweets and 223,000 likes and forced a national apology from Starbucks5.

How to Use This Meme

The phrase is typically deployed in captions, headlines, or replies attached to video of a Black person being questioned, followed, filmed, or arrested during an everyday activity5. Users often coin a new "___ while black" variant on the fly, swapping in whatever the person was doing at the time, waiting for coffee, birdwatching, mowing a lawn, to underline that the activity itself was harmless3.