Leadership Quote by John C. White

The line lands like a grin you don’t quite trust: a politician pointing out how quickly dignity gets outsourced to symbols. White’s image is deliberately small-scale - not a grand speech about rights, but a crosswalk and a cop. That’s the point. He’s showing how status in public life can be made legible only when the state performs it for you. The “policeman” isn’t just traffic control; he’s a walking stamp of legitimacy, a uniformed witness who turns an ordinary person into “somebody” for the length of a stoplight.

The subtext is a critique of a culture that confuses visibility with worth. If you need an escort to feel real, the problem isn’t your self-esteem; it’s a civic order built to overlook you until power pauses the world on your behalf. The phrase “like you are somebody” is doing heavy work: it admits the performance. You’re not becoming somebody; you’re being treated like it, temporarily, conditionally, at someone else’s discretion.

Contextually, this sits in the long American argument about who counts in public space - who gets protected, who gets hurried along, who gets stopped. It also jabs at political pageantry: motorcades, security details, ribbon-cuttings, the theater of importance. White’s question is rhetorical, but the sting is real. If personhood requires a public signal, the system has already decided that “somebody” is a privilege, not a given.