I saw something shitty last week.
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I'm at an event with thousands (literally) of high school teachers and college faculty. I was sitting in the lobby drinking coffee at a convention center when a man walked in. He was old. And black. He looked really disheveled. But that's hardly out of the ordinary. He had crazy, untamed hair (common among Old Man Professors; 10% of the men here have his haircut). He was dressed very badly, essentially in an untucked rumpled shirt and pajama bottoms (We are all extremely dressed down, because we have very long days and the emphasis is on dressing strictly for comfort; I haven't worn pants without an elastic waistband the whole time).
He had no badge, so the security guard – note that this was a locally staffed person from a temp agency, unaffiliated in any way with the event or its organizers – told him he couldn't come in.
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He explained that everyone has to come in without a badge the first time because you have to go inside to register and get your badge. You know. Pretty logical.
I had just done this exact thing the previous day. Thousands of other people did it too. The vast majority were disheveled. Many were also old. Many were also dressed like hobos. But few were also black.
The security guard kept telling him he could not enter, and finally he just came in. He had explained himself at least three times. She kept physically getting in front of him and trying to block him. He said multiple times, don't touch me. She did not. But she went into full, SIR, I'M ASKING YOU TO LEAVE mode. Within 10 seconds she was on a walkie-talkie calling for a police officer. A cop showed up.
So here, for the millionth time, an armed police officer was brought to confront a black man doing exactly nothing wrong, and exactly what everyone around him was also doing. The cop did not do anything. But he was there, and armed. Even if there was a 0.0001% chance the situation could have gone badly, that's 0.0001% higher than when I walked into a bland convention center to register for an event I was invited to be at. And odds of 0.0001% eventually get someone if this scenario is repeated often enough.
The whole time I'm watching this and thinking, this is how people end up getting shot. The wrong cop shows up on the wrong day in the wrong mood and confronts something less than total obedience from a black man and the tasers and guns come out, or someone ends up face-down on the ground with a knee in their back, or someone ends up in handcuffs.
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There was no reason at all for that cop to be there. And it's not his fault he was there; it was his job to show up when called.
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The problem was that another middle aged white woman looked at someone and concluded that because he is a black man the police needed to be summoned.
Stop calling the police on black men who aren't doing anything other than existing. Thanks.
mago says:
What was it George Carlin said?
"Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Another fine example of dumb cultural/social conditioning and its dim and dangerous manifestations.
And it gets even worse. Dios savalganos.
Inkberrow says:
Good and decent and sophisticated leftists know when to extrapolate telling societal dynamics from individual instances, as here with this tale of unutterable woe. Oh, the humanity!
The same leftists also know when NOT to expend moral and intellectual energy in this connection, as regarding the grossly disproportionate violent crimes committed by African-Americans.
All in all, it’s hard out here for a perpetual-victimhood pimp. And most of all for the white leftist Elmer Gantrys, honoring free-range sacred cows in the breach rather than the observance.
DocAmazing says:
Ooo, ign'int troll right out of the gate! You've hit the big time!
Anyway, I hope that you told the event organizers, so that they can tell the rent-a-cop agency to maybe do a smidgen of training of their security staff.
democommie says:
I wander around in various buildings while all sorts of things are going on. I tend to appraise things as I walk–wondering what idiot decided this, that or some other was required or required being moved or whatever.
I have been approached many, many times by many different sorts of persons. They walk up and ask me if such and such is thus and so. They assume that I'm somehow connected to whatever they need an answer for.
If I was black and doing the EXACT SAME THING, I would be explaining myself to officious dickheads–far more than I do already.
A DocAmazing:
I see the vaccuous inanity which thinks he's edgy has already defecated in the beverage tureen–I don't remember him being quite so desparate. Then again, his mots de merde are not worth reading, nevermind remembering.
Dyevulon says:
I worry this happened in SLC, a city with less than 1% black population and no experiential basis for racist attitudes. We seriously just don't have black people here, so like, we have these attitudes from TV?
Inkberrow says:
Dye—
For an apparent devotee, you know precious little of your own dogma. Have you forgotten then-candidate Barack Obama’s powerful sermon about how because of race solidarity he could not possibly throw Reverend Wright under the bus? You remember—it was a week or two before he threw Reverend Wright under the bus.
But yea, Barack preached that old time leftist gospel, that slavery and racism was America’s original sin. In Salt Lake City or South Chicago, whites are born in sin and guilt. If a white man says he has no racism, he deceives himself, and the truth is not in him. Wakanda was somehow thwarted by colonialism, and reparations are due.
Linda Z says:
? If you thought he was part of the event, why didn't you step up to offer assistance with checking registration ?
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to….." sit on their asses drinking coffee
(Long time reader and appreciate your work…..but sometimes….)
Ten Bears says:
In retrospect, I should have recognized it as the beginning of the end when the institution where my academic career ended began requiring badges and photo id's of those like me. Schedule our time.
democommie says:
@ Linda Z:
I have no idea about what Ed's reply might be but it could be that he's already marked for death by the RWNJ deathsquads.
Liebchen says:
I would have asked the guard to leave him alone, explaining exactly what you did, here, Ed.
Bitter Scribe says:
This is tangential, but I can't stop thinking about it…
How dumb is it to require a badge to enter the area where you register to get a badge? I've been to countless trade shows, conferences, etc., and I've never seen that.
democommie says:
@ Bitter Scribe:
I'm guessing that it WASN'T required until that particular security person went totez, "I'm the fucking MAN!"–even if it was a woman.
billcinsd says:
What kind of stupid conference was this? Every conference I have been to, probably 2-3 per year for the last 30 years, only restricts access to the sessions and the exhibit, the building is open to everyone. Of course, I have been to very few conferences that were not in public venues
democommie says:
@ billcinsd:
I haven't been to any sort of conference in yeqrs but I manage to wander in and out of restricted events, especially if I'm carrying a camera and know the securtiy people. It's not that they willingly let me crash, in most cases; they're just so used to seeing me that they pay almost no attention to me. I'm pretty sure that if I was black–things would change.
Knox Harrington says:
How lucky he was to have you there to witness it and then record it for posterity. He was seriously lucky that such an erudite, educated person of standing just happened to see that one-in-a-million occurrence. Maybe next time it happens he'll get even luckier and have someone actually intervene to help…if only to ameliorate the white guilt they feel when they see such a thing. Or maybe next time there won't be either, which is bad for "him" but good in the sense that nobody will have to ameliorate their white guilt by either blogging about it or stepping in to help. If a tree falls in a forest and there's nobody there to blog about it… But, then again, it's a good thing white people know this happens, because, damnit, this kind of shit is so underreported I had to read the post several times just to make sure I understood that racism isn't over post-Obama.