Three years ago, I had recently moved into my new apartment. I was separated and waiting to appear for my divorce proceedings. I've never slept well, and I often stay up late watching television. And I'm a licensed gun owner with a concealed carry permit.

One night, or rather early morning, at almost 1 a.m., as I sat on my second-hand sofa streaming reruns of LOST, I heard an abrupt pounding on my front door, less than ten feet away from where I sat. It was accompanied by an incoherent shouting. I wear hearing aids at work, but take them out when I get home, so the voice, already muffled by the heavy front door, was further garbled.

Startled and alarmed, I walked quickly to the bedroom and retrieved my handgun from where I keep it secured. Holding it behind my thigh, I walked cautiously back to the front door, where the pounding and shouting was still going on, turned the porch light on, and slowly unlocked the door, holding on to the knob, ready to throw my weight against it if this was some kind of push-in robbery attempt, trying to be ready for anything.

What I had not been ready for was the sight of several men in dark blue outfits lined up outside my door. Then someone shouted, "GUN!!" and I was looking into the muzzle of a 9mm service automatic. Only then did I see the patch on the man's sleeve in the shape of a badge, only then did I see the silver name tag on his pocket, and realize- these were the police.

Then luck intervened and someone said, "Hey, it's okay, I know him," and he called me by name. It turned out to be a former coworker of mine in the Department of Corrections who went off to join the police department. He reassured his colleagues that I was "cool", and I measurably assisted by slowly placing my gun on the floor and sliding it away. But I still had no idea why police were pounding on my door in the middle of the night.

They asked me to come outside (in my bare feet) and started asking me the strangest questions; if I was the only one in the apartment, was I sure no one else was there, was there a woman in the apartment. Then they told me they needed to search the place and that I would have to be restrained and wait while they did. "Restrained" is a polite term for handcuffed. It took them much longer to search two rooms, one kitchen and a bathroom than I thought possible, but I suppose time is subjective when one is "restrained".

They explained, as they released me, that there had been a phone call claiming that a woman was screaming and waving a gun at a man in my apartment. A month or so later, another officer came around in the afternoon, knocking (not pounding) on my door, to ask if I had a secret pit under my floor where I was hiding people. Apparently someone in my neighborhood was suffering delusions when they went off their medication and making calls to the police about the neighbors. But that's not the point.

The point is, I wonder what these officers (exclusively White, other than my old work partner) would have done had a Black man come to the door in the middle of the night with a pistol hidden behind his leg. Would they have given him a chance to put it down? Or would they have simply reacted? Would they have assumed he was about to shoot?

I'm not drawing any conclusions one way or the other. But it made me stop and think about the assumptions many people make about the police, and the assumptions police make about the people they deal with. I've had the experience from both sides, as a Corrections Officer having to get compliance and having to look on everyone in a situation as a possible suspect, and as a possible suspect myself being confronted by the police in a tactical situation that, had I made the wrong move, might very well have resulted in my death. But what I'm wondering right now is: how did the color of my skin weight the equation? Did the accident of my genetics keep me alive? Because, if it did, that says something's still very wrong with America.