While I was commuting to the office one day, I noticed a Ford Bronco that had a vanity license plate that consisted of nothing but 1’s and I’s. So if you can picture this description in your head, you can imagine that it’s basically a vanity plate with seven straight lines at a quick glance. You can also probably also imagine that at a quick glance, it’s probably impossible to accurately pinpoint what the correct combination of characters is, which is more than likely the intention of the white guy who chose it and I’m confident that it’s a white guy because only white people drive and covet Ford Broncos the way they do.
The thing is, this isn’t the first deliberately deceptive vanity tag I’ve seen, it’s just that now I felt like writing about it, and how it seems to be a pattern that it’s always white men who tend to have them. 1I11II1, 0O00OO0, B888BB8, or any other combination of characters that have the capability to blend and confuse human eyes, which is more than likely the intention. And when people have the intention to deceive, than more than likely it’s so that they can get away with deceit; probably just driving like a dick, but these days the hopes and thoughts that they can confuse the antichrist-like nefarious flock cameras that are all the rage in the increasing environment of surveillance.
And it’s always white males that do this. Every time I’ve noticed one of these types of plates and I’ve managed to pull adjacent to the vehicle, it’s always been a white guy. It’s not hyperbole, and it’s not just an isolated incident. Definitely more than this one instance, but maybe not quite ten times, but every single time I’ve seen a deliberately confusing vanity tag, it’s been a white guy.
Clearly, this is the white man’s equivalent to the blackout license plate covers that black people who want to drive like dicks put on their cars; the intention is the same, but the approaches are different. Black folk don’t want The Man and Big Brother to have it easy identifying their whips while they drive however the fuck they want to, so they use dark covers and obscurers, but in only the way Whitey can do, white folk do it by hiding in plain sight with completely legal, albeit hard to decipher, vanity plates.
I have a friend that’s in law enforcement, and they said that modern plate readers have no issue in being able to identify vague license plates, so really the intention of them is to confuse other people on the road. The irony is that white or black, people who want to act like they’re trying to obstruct and make their license plates less identifiable, only draw more scrutiny to themselves by going to the lengths they do.
If I saw an orange Ford Bronco whose license plate was a state-issued CWN5637, I’ll have forgotten it by the next light, but regardless of if I’m accurate or not, I’ll remember seeing I1II11I or whatever such combination actually is and know that the guy driving it is probably some entitled white guy who drives like a douche.
