I take it from your post that you're from Memphis. No offense intended, but I find it completely plausible that a white cop in a southern state would see a bus load of black people and assume there were drugs on board. If this scene offended you, I'm sorry, but it totally worked for me.
First of all that state trooper scene wasn't suppose to be in Memphis. That was in Knoxville. The Memphis scene was the bar that they stopped at and everybody in the bar seemed rather friendly to me, somewhat out of touch and misguided but still open minded and friendly. You could tell that they weren't use to having blacks in that bar but that's just because of the type of bar it was. You don't usually see a bunch of black guys in country/western bars riding the bull. I'm from Memphis, too and I can say that back in the 90's, which is the era of this movie, the club/bar scene was very much divided but I don't think that it's necessarily because of racism, I think it's mostly just because some blacks and whites simply don't listen to the same type of music and don't enjoy the same type of atmosphere. People seem to get stuck in their ways and don't like trying new things. I mean, how many blacks do you expect to see in a country/western bar, participating in a line dance or riding a mechanical bull and how many middle aged whites do you expect to see twerking to hip hop music? However, there are some mixed clubs around the city, especially on Beale Street that you will find both blacks and whites, enjoying the same types of music, food and atmosphere, like the blues clubs and the clubs that cater to an older crowd or even the clubs that cater to a younger crowd but play a variety to different types of music.
Secondly, although I believe that the Knoxville scene was suppose to come off as racist, I find it very unlikely that that would have happened. Mostly because it was a bus full of people but it was at night. The troopers, who pulled them over, had no way of knowing that it was a bus full of black men heading to the million man march, when they decided to pull them over. It would have been better if they had had the bus breaking down scene in Knoxville, during the daytime hours and then have the troopers come and harass them.
All typos and misspellings courtesy of a public educational system.
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