Oh man, this is well worth reading in its entirety. This is just incredibly solid, well-reported local journalism. Sam Levin covers online racial profiling in Oakland:
White residents have also used Nextdoor to complain and organize calls to police about Black residents being too noisy in public parks and bars — raising concerns that the site amplifies the harmful impacts of gentrification. On Nextdoor and other online neighborhood groups — including Facebook pages and Yahoo and Google listservs — residents have called Black and Latino men suspicious for being near bus stops, standing in “shadows,” making U-turns, and hanging around outside coffee shops. Residents frequently warn each other to be on the look out for suspects with little more description than “Black” and “wearing a hoodie.”
“These posts cast such a wide net on our young Black men,” said Shikira Porter, an Upper Dimond resident, who is Black. “You start seeing this over and over again, and you understand quickly that, oh, it’s the Black body that they’re afraid of.”
In some Nextdoor groups, when people ask their neighbors to think twice before labeling someone suspicious, other users attack them for playing the “race card” and being the “political correctness police.” Some groups have even actively silenced and banned the few vocal voices of color speaking up on the websites, according to records that I reviewed.
This sometimes toxic virtual environment has real-world impacts. Residents encourage each other to call police, share tips on how to reach law enforcement, and sometimes even alert cops and security guards about suspicious activity they’ve only read secondhand from other commenters. I spoke to longtime Oaklanders who say the profiling is getting worse, noting that they have recently had neighbors question them on their block or in their own driveway — suspicious of whether they might be up to no good. People of color described stories of white residents running away from them, screaming at them to leave a shared garden space, and calling police on young children in their own home. In some areas, the profiling is further exacerbated by the growing presence of private patrol officers whom residents have hired to guard the streets.
You can read the whole thing at the East Bay Express.
Ugh, people do this on NextDoor in my neighborhood here in Houston. Lots of white tears when others of us call them out on it. Some examples of why people on NextDoor called the cops:
Looking at houses while walking down the street: “noticed a man in gray pants, blue T-shirt, wearing a hat and backpack walking down east 16th stopping and staring at random houses.”
Frowning while walking down the street: “I was on the south side of the street when I saw a man walking on the north side heading east in my direction. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of it as I always see lots of people walking and biking in the neighborhood both morning and evenings (one of the best things about the Heights!) but as he got closer, I had a strong instinct that this was not a friendly person. This was a person with mal intent. He had a scowl on his face and he stared at me very strangely. ”
The list goes on and on, but there is one common denominator: it is always a POC. Always.
Noooooo! (I don’t miss Texas or Houston, but I DO feel nostalgia for the Heights, despite the actual crime and this dickishness you describe.)
I see it on next door everyday here in Oakland. And when you call them out they go off even more.
Several days late to this, but this happens in my Austin Nextdoor group too. And LMM is right, they do really start to go off when you say something, and the mods don’t do anything to help. It’s downright scary.
Whitey sure is crazy.
I hadn’t heard of this website, so I went and signed up. I’m happy to say no sign yet of racial comments. Which is not to say I haven’t heard them in person from at least one of my neighbors.
There’s a facebook page for people whose bikes have been stolen in the twin cities. Mostly it’s pictures of bikes that have been stolen so that people can keep their eyes peeled, and it has actually resulted in several recoveries. But there are also posts of “saw this shady dude with a nice bike, seems fishy” and guess what – almost always youth of color. And people wonder why bike culture feels exclusive.
I see the same thing in facebook bike groups in DC.
Disgusting, but not surprising. This is what happens when otherwise decent white people refuse to entertain the suspicion that they might be just a tiiiny bit racist. Racism is for evil people, and I’m not evil, therefore my suspicion of those teenage boys who just HAPPEN to be black is totally justified and I should warn my neighbors like the good person I am.
I don’t remember where I read it first, but I’ve come to think of racism as kind of a hereditary disease. If you’re white, you almost certainly have it (I’m saying this as a white person, if it matters). You probably can’t get completely rid of it, but you can control the symptoms. Step 1 of 539486598: don’t post shit like this on NextDoor, and call out people who do.
The Yahoo neighborhood group I joined a couple of years ago for an area in DC I would like to move to had this going on as well. “Strange man looking at our house” and “Be on the look out for a man in sweatpants” or whatever. I remember feeling that it was very vague and creepy and not helpful. But now of course I am like: Oh, it was racism! That explains a lot.
Making u-turns is suspicious now? WTF? This… does not even make sense?
I was recently “strongly encouraged” to participate in the neighborhood watch group at the uptight suburban apartment complex that I’ve accidentally found myself living in (long story.) Hard pass on that one, thanks.
“Making u-turns is suspicious now?”
Yeah, when I see someone make a u-turn, I suspect they just found a parking spot. Occam’s razor and all that.
Or they’re just new in town. I move so often that I make u-turns aaalllll the time. Without u-turns, I can’t navigate at all.
According to some theories of law enforcement, driving into a neighborhood where you “don’t belong” and making a u-turn indicates that one is looking to buy drugs. A long time ago, before I stopped driving altogether, I got into trouble that way, only it was the other way around–white person in a black neighborhood.
I have never been a confident driver, and my ability to navigate is even worse at night. I had taken the little girls to the museum the day after Daylight Savings Time ended, driving their father’s expensive new car with the carseats already installed. So. I took the wrong turn on the way home in the dark. I was trying to convince the little girls that everything was fine, I knew where we were, and we would be home soon…the 6 year old wasn’t buying it. I found myself in a very run-down residential neighborhood, realized, “this is not the way back to the main road,” and tried to turn around. That was when I got pulled over. All 3 of us burst into tears as soon as the policeman started yelling at us. He let us go with a warning never to come back, after what felt like 10 minutes of yelling at me about how terrible it was to drive slowly and look around, or to turn around in anybody’s driveway. And I’m a white woman.
Right now my husband and I are talking about buying a house, and this worry is *heavily* influencing my thoughts on which neighborhoods we’re looking at.
Our current NextDoor situation is happily pretty quiet on the racial profiling front, but there are some serious and heavy conversations that go on about the transgender sex workers that frequent parts of the neighborhood which are very tricky.
ETA: I’ve been thinking a lot about this and the current policy push to more consciously racially integrate neighborhoods because there are *so* many articles about how the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood plays a role in how well an individual fares later on in life, and is particular linked to some many racial disparities between black and white folks.
I like the idea of it, but the practice seems to end up being either breaking up more resilient social networks of low-income black and brown folks and encouraging them to move out to the (generally) predominantly white suburbs OR basically encouraging gentrification of low income black/brown neighborhoods. The former places them in situations where they’re more likely to pay for better access to jobs and higher quality education face serious microaggressions and other psychologically harmful things; the latter means they get priced out of their homes as soon as the neighborhood becomes more safe and potentially they face microaggressions anyway for existing bc ppl post shit like this on online forums. If you’re middle-class & Black and move into a gentrifying neighborhood, you can still face the microaggression anyway. Basically, Black and Latino POC are generally f’ed no matter what.
TL;DR: white ppl please stop acting via your unconscious racial biases; we all have them but when you act on yours it’s 10x more destructive because your privilege generally means that someone acts on it, with potentially life-threatening results.
Ok not your main point, but my boss in D.C. used to say “don’t walk down H Street, that’s where the he-shes are.” This was true, that is where they were! But all I could think was, “Dude, you are 6’2″ and 250 lbs., I am 100% sure that the transgender streetwalkers are more afraid of you than you are of them.”
Definitely not my main point but there is definitely a conversation re. transgender sex workers and they way that they are treated by everybody that needs to be had. I am still learning/listening about these issues, but it really does bother me that some people use it as a coded way of implying an area is dangerous for cisgendered, middle class, mostly white folks. I think reality shows that these sex workers are often the ones who face any danger in the area.
ETA: there’s probably an underlying conversation here where greater privilege is roughly related to disproportional & heightened sense of potential victimhood, but I’m not sure how to articulate it. It’s a combo of fragility + privilege + .. lack of touch with reality?
I suppose this is the country that made Breaking Dawn, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised at the tendency for through-the-looking-glass paranoia!
More to your main point, you might enjoy this article, though it’s not about your town: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Novemb… What I found most interesting about it was how the decentralized nature of “gentrification” (whatever that might mean) stymies the efforts of those who would address it.
My sense is that it’s a canary in a coal mine perception — that IF trans sex workers are present, the area must ALSO be very dangerous, not necessarily due to the presence of the sex workers themselves. Or looking at it the other way, trans sex workers can/will only work in an area that’s relatively underpoliced, if they are working on the street. (This may or may not be actually true, I don’t know — I’m just thinking through the perceptions that people might have.) (And there are certainly people who are just like “eww gross trans people” about the whole thing and are allergic to nuance or you know, thinking.)
Of course, that ignores the fact that (a) sex workers are probably not going to mug you on the street, out of nowhere and (b) you’re probably safer if there are more people around when you’re walking around late at night.
I wouldn’t be concerned about the sex workers themselves, but their clientele. Who wants to walk down a street where strange men are likely to assume you’re professionally available if you’re even slightly dressed up? That sounds at least annoying, at worst dangerous.
This was supposed to be a response to chickpeas above but it jumped here!
I had this happen last year in my embarrassingly suburban neighborhood. I was walking back from the grocery store and some guys leaned out the window and waved money at me. I had headphones in so I shrieked in surprise and they turned around to apologize. They were super polite but how many polite johns are there? And we have a lot of young women of color who live in the neighborhood or come in on the bus for the magnet high school and I really worry they’ll be subjected to harassment first from johns and then from cops! No winning!
Sex workers report that the guys harassing women on the street aren’t clients (“john” is not a term sex workers prefer, I’ve learned), they’re random guys who like to harass women and are using the known presence of sex workers as an excuse to do so. So the sex workers get harassed, and they’re the ones getting the bulk of the harassment, and they also get blamed for it by people who want them out of the neighbourhood.
From what sex workers have said, the number one threat to them is police. After that, it’s random people harassing them who are not remotely interested in being clients. Actual prospective clients are going to walk up and say quietly, “Are you working?” They’re not the ones causing trouble.
I think it’s more that street-based sex workers do tend to be in the rougher parts of town, due to the stigma of their job. When I was living in one of these areas, I wasn’t worried about risks connected to the sex workers on my street, I was worried about being mugged. I still find it unnerving how quickly the police got there when I rang to report that my neighbour’s door was being broken down. Two minutes, as I recall. They didn’t actually do anything, of course, the police wouldn’t dream of taking action about domestic violence, but they were there fast.
I don’t know how the journalist didn’t die of irony on the spot:
“When I asked Bartlett — who is also the lead organizer for his local private patrol group — how he felt about the concerns from families of color who fear that Nextdoor profiling and the presence of guards is a toxic mix, he responded, “I think it’s paranoia.””
I know! Amazing.
In some Nextdoor groups, when people ask their neighbors to think twice before labeling someone suspicious, other users attack them for playing the “race card” and being the “political correctness police.”
A big problem on my local Nextdoor group, too. And yet, when I click on these people’s profiles, it says the thing they like most about our neighborhood is the diversity.
This doesn’t surprise me, sadly. People like moving to neighborhoods that seem “authentic” and diverse, but they prefer the ambiance and social status that comes from it. God forbid you actually talk to your neighbors.
“Thompson, who grew up in the projects of East Oakland and has lived in Glenview for seventeen years, said he stopped wearing hoodies.”
Okay maybe this is a dumb question but I am asking in earnest: when did the hoodie become the universal signifier of black criminality and why?
I suspect the answer to your hoodie question is poor Trayvon Martin. It seems like no surprise that George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch guy.
I live in Durham, NC, and am looking at buying a house downtown, because I finally have enough money saved to buy rather than to keep paying rent. My deep fear about doing this instead of buying in the ‘burbs is that, in some way, I’ll contribute to this nastiness, just by being there.
I have no answers, but I’m reminded, as far as taking seriously the concerns of communities of color, of Margaret Atwood’s thought that “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Tone your paranoia down a touch, my fellow white people. You’re not the ones mostly likely to get hurt here.
I think it has been for a while, just not explicitly so, at least in the US. I know the UK has pretty openly associated hoodies with criminality for ages.
I was going to say this – the whole “hug a hoodie” thing was in 2006.
I think there’s a tendency among many white transplants (note: I am a white transplant) that when you rent or buy a house in a neighborhood, you have claimed it and it’s yours, instead of seeing yourself as a guest in somebody else’s home. It’s not just about picking up your trash and saying hello to your neighbors, although you should absolutely do both, it’s about respecting the place you moved to.
Calling the cops on people for being too loud in a public park. Christ.
I will never not repose Noe Valley’s finest.
http://imgur.com/rXT7dbs1bcb798b0a120ee48c2
That.. doesn’t even make sense? The writer goes out of their way to describe the most unthreatening, polite person, and then calls for action.
Not just calls for action, tries to organize a bleeding *posse*. Honestly.
I’m the Lead/Founder for my neighborhood on Nextdoor, so I try to keep the overt nonsense in check. But! I have yet to find a way to get people to start paying attention to their assumptions BEFORE they post. They need to ask themselves if it’s a legitimate concern, or their internal bias peeking out. I don’t think they can kick me out, but I also don’t want to go in swinging and alienate people that can change. It’s been a weird line to walk, and feels…really ineffectual.
It’s really cool that you are doing that work. I have nothing really more useful to say? But I wanted to just say that your post gave me a little comfort that the jerkass described in the article is less representative than one fears. Stand strong against the overt nonsense!
I live in Oakland’s Maxwell Park area they speak of. Even off of NextDoor, my roommate’s boyfriend is a black male and was harassed by our white neighbor because he parked in our neighbor’s “preferred parking spot.” We see the profiling mentioned in the article on a weekly basis. Some people speak out about it, but as the article says, they are not taken seriously.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/…
I Was Racially Profiled in My Own Driveway
A retired Major League Baseball player explains how he’s trying to turn an upsetting encounter with the police into an opportunity for dialogue.
He’s certainly not the first. Remember Professor Skip Gates? In Cambridge? Professor at Harvard? Friend of the President’s?
/so bad it has its own Wiki page
I am honestly not sure my blood pressure can handle reading more on the Eastbay Express. And it is generally low.
I live in Baltimore too, in Fells Point, and I have a strong suspicion that you're talking about the Fells Point Neighbors Facebook group. They are CRAZY. There's two guys on the Fells Point Nextdoor group right now that are talking sincerely about longer criminal sentences, and "whatever happened to that three strikes law? We need that." Unbelievable.
This is a thing? I thought it was just my toxic neighborhood Nextdoor group (in Seattle). When I joined, I thought the site would improve neighborhood unity and keep me informed, but it’s just making me want to move somewhere else…and I’m white and solidly middle class. I can only imagine how marginalized someone poorer and a minority would feel reading those posts. Apparently a lot of my neighbors really, really don’t like poor people.
No, Nextdoor is the perfect petri dish for cultivating this shit. It’s why I gave up on my neighborhood’s Nextdoor group (in a small midwestern city). When I pointed this out at a “neighborhood visioning meeting” (translation: group of Nice Progressive White People™ in a room talking about how they don’t want the place to gentrify in one breath and lamenting the lack of yoga studios and coffee shops in the next), I got a lecture on how I should have apparently changed the entire culture of the message board just by being positive. Someone freaking patted me on the shoulder.
Just today, someone on our local Nextdoor was alerting the neighbors that someone was driving around early in the morning
with their flashers on. It has always turned out to be the paper being delivered. Yes, we have some theft, but some people are
really ready to jump on any car or person they think is out of place in our nice, expensive neighborhood.
Maybe I’m just fixating too much on one detail, but I cannot understand why you would tell your neighbor she can come get your lemons and then freak out when a person shows up to get your lemons. Even if you imagined the neighbor to be white and were surprised when she turned out to be black, basic logic would tell you, “Oh, that must be Audrey, the neighbor I invited over to get some lemons.” Why the HELL would you assume you were about to be robbed! Moron!