I thought I was liberal and open minded about race … until I realised what was going on in my New York building

The phone rings, and I look down to see that the front desk is calling me to let me know that a visitor has arrived. At New York my apartment, Friday night is wine night, my areligious mid-20s nod to Shabbat. There's no meal and no prayer, but I invite my friends over for wine, cheese, and conversation that becomes increasingly raucous as the night wears on and the wine runs out. And when the phone rings on wine night, when the front desk calls me to ask permission to send a visitor up, I know one thing for sure: that friend isn't white.

I live in a doorman building on the Upper West Side, a moneyed neighbourhood in what is now the world's most economically unequal metropolis, a place where racial profiling is embedded in police policy, the controversial "stop-and-frisk" program, and entrenched in police practice, and where people of colour have been detained simply for trying to shop in a "white" space. Given how law enforcement targets minority communities even in neighbourhoods where white people fear to tread, all spaces in New York are arguably white spaces. And given our tendency to police people of colour from coast to coast, be it by banning them from school because of their hairstyles or shooting them dead when they come to our doors asking for help, all spaces in this country are arguably "white spaces".

But, I've come to realise, few spaces are as white as the lobby of a doorman building on the Upper West Side.

Most white people in New York live their daily lives without experiencing racial profiling, without even seeing it; until a few months ago, I had never seen a person stopped and frisked. But if you live in a doorman building and have friends who aren't white, that profiling becomes more visible. Most importantly, living in such a building, you start to see what so many people of colour already know: racial profiling in its various forms is done to "protect" white people – to shield "us" from "them". In a doorman building, what is implicit outside becomes obvious, and impossible to avoid: this racism is being done in my name.

The doormen who work downstairs are uniformly polite and obliging (to me, at least). But the pattern is clear: they let my white guests come and go as they please, even ones they've never seen before. They stop my African-American friends, even ones who have visited on multiple occasions.

In his seminal work on doormen, Columbia Professor of Social Sciences Peter Bearman found that doormen use "homophily principles" to decide which guests should be announced. In other words, doormen expect guests to look like their hosts, and if they do not, their presence in the building may be questioned, or at least verified with the host. Additionally, Bearman observes, because doormen are recruited from within ethnic networks in which African Americans are poorly represented, "doormen are much less likely to admit blacks or other minority group members without announcing them first." In this sense, then, my black guests have double outsider status – and as they stand in my lobby waiting for permission to do what my white friends do freely, I suspect they know it.

The doormen in my building, most of them immigrants from former Soviet republics, may or may not believe, in their hearts, that black people pose a threat to the mostly white residents of my building. However, their personal beliefs are largely beside the point: they live, as we all do, in a culture that views black people as threatening, as criminal, as untrustworthy and out of place in spaces of wealth and privilege, and puts systems in place to make those spaces "safe" for white people – at black people's expense.

This is thrown into even sharper relief when you consider that I'm not just a white person, but a white woman. America has a long and tragic history of punishing black men for contact (or alleged contact) with white women, and all too often, the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante violence was couched in terms of protecting white womanhood from "dangerous" black men. It was done – supposedly – in their names. And so it is today, in a modern way.

The additional suspicion with which my black guests are treated is not a form of obvious violence. Compared to the actions of the Klan, being asked to wait a few minutes in the lobby is, some will point out, not a big deal. But these are microaggressions, small and common instances of discrimination, and "their slow accumulation over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience… social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly." The violence this time is psychic.

Much of the policing of racial minorities, done in the name of protecting white people, goes unseen by us. If we want to continue the hard, crucial work of ending discrimination of all kinds in this country and this world, that must change.

We must take the blinders off and understand the scope of racial profiling in our world. We must consider the unacceptable violence, both psychic and physical, that it inflicts on our fellow citizens. It's time to demand an end to the profiling that happens all around us – on our streets, in our schools, in our stores, and in our homes. Not anymore, and not in our name.

Original Article
Source: theguardian.com/
Author: Chloe Angyal