Possibly, but was this group the very first group of people to stay there? Were the police called when white guests loaded luggage into their car?
It was an unlicensed Airbnb. There were people the neighbor had never seen before taking things out of the house and putting them in cars while the owner was away. She gave them a friendly wave and they didn’t respond. Whether she’s racist or not I don’t see any evidence of it from this information.
Can you imagine how people would have responded if the homeowner had come home to find her house burgled and the neighbor had said, “Well I saw strangers taking things from your home but I didn’t want to get involved.”?
Why not call neighbor first?
Why not get license plate of car, while you try to contact neighbor, before involving police?
Why did police send 7 cars, and a helicopter, for 3 women, with suitcases? Does anyone besides me find that an unusual, over the top, response?
Probably, they had to check it out once they had the call. Who would they have sent if the suspected burglars were white? Anyone here live around there, and know what is customary?
@Cardinal Fang Watch the whole video. The police behaved absolutely appropriately, as did the neighbor. First time AirBnB, suitcases disappearing from your neighbor’s house? Of course they should call the cops.
The only fault is the landlord not advising the neighbor that it was becoming an AirBnB.
I would call the police first. Yes, the police do send a lot of support to calls. We had an incident in our neighborhood last week. All I know was that someone called the police because a family member was having a ‘mental health’ issue. But the helicopter was overhead at 11pm. shining its light into my backyard. I thought there was a criminal on the loose. Until the police know exactly what they are dealing with, they send out a lot of cops.
We’ve had knock-knock burglars in our general area. I’m glad neighbors called the police. The culprits were caught.
We also send videos from our Ring doorbells around to the neighborhood when unknown people come to the door because another problem has been stealing packages from doorsteps.
It’s good to have a vigilant neighborhood.
I’ve been thinking about this thread and the one about the NA boys visiting CSU a lot. One thing that concerns me is the quick rush to label people as racist because I think it strips incidents of their subtly and allows us all to wash our hands of any sort of culpability. “That person is racist. They’re bad. I would never react to the situation that way, so I’m good.”
I think the overwhelming majority of us, of whatever race, carry some racist attitudes. Here’s my little bit of racism. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white town. The only black kids I knew of in my school system were bused in from the city through a diversity program. When I got out into the wider world and started interacting with more people of color I found I had this little self-congratulatory voice in my head saying things like,“I’m not afraid of that large black man. That means I’m not a racist. Good little me.” “I have a black friend. That means I’m not racist. Good little me.” “I didn’t shy away from that black street person. That means I’m not racist. Good little me.” Sick, I know. Even weirder was the awareness that this in and of itself was racist!
My point is that we all carry biases with us. Some are more destructive than others, but when we assume that other people are just plain old bad racists, instead of being well-meaning people with implicit biases it makes it easier to write them off instead of exploring both their, and our own racism.
I think many of these situations fall into grey areas. Did someone call the police because the Airbnb guests were black? Possibly. Would they have called the police if they were white? Possibly. What’s in my mind more likely is that the race of the guests made them seem just a tiny bit more “other”, more out of place in the neighborhood to the neighbor. Is this a form of racism? Sure, but it doesn’t make them David Duke.
On the flip side, would the guests have waved back to the neighbor if she were black? Possibly. Would they have assumed the arrival of the police was related to race if the neighbor was black? Who knows.
The issue is differential treatment. If it’s right to call the cops on black women putting suitcases in cars, it’s right to call the cops on white women putting suitcases in cars, but that does not happen.
Here’s another example. A psychology professor set up an experiment where they put a white guy or a black guy seemingly trying to steal a bike in a park. In an hour of “attempted theft” by a white guy, only one person tries to call the cops. Within seconds of the black guy trying to “steal” the bike, parkgoers converge, confront him and start to call the authorities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ABRlWybBqM
I am a white woman with black, hispanic, and asian family members. I would vastly prefer all of my worldly possessions be taken from my house than have the police called on one of them. Because at best they would endure humiliation and one more example of how white society considers them other and suspect. And at worst they would be beaten up, or end up dead.
Every person is someone’s family member. We should care about them all.
Sue: I think you make good points. However, I have been approaching it differently. I am white, and keep wondering how I would feel if those had been my sons on the tour or if my white friends and I were loading suitcases into a car. I am pretty sure I’d be outraged.
I agree, but I’m trying to get to the issue of why that happens. When we dismiss it as people just being racist jerks we absolve ourselves of the harder work of examining ourselves and our larger society.
An off-topic aside:
Early every fall, we seem to have a distraught parent posting his or her child’s college required exercises on white privilge during orientation and that this was distressing and upsetting and maybe insulting to child and parent.
Would it be worthwhile to consider now if linking to this sort of thread would be a useful response?
I agree we need to do this, but first we have to agree that it DOES happen. Some people in this thread seem to be unwilling to admit that the examples we’ve been discussing are examples of disparate treatment based on race.
In previous threads, people have said that I should not say a person with unconscious bias is “racist,” despite their treating white people and people of color differently. I said, OK, what term should I use to describe this? Nobody gave me an answer. I’ll repeat the question:
If someone’s bias leads them to treat people differently based on nothing more than skin color, but they do not consciously intend to treat people differently based on skin color, what should I call that?
From the point of view of the person unjustly targeted because of skin color, the reason they’re unjustly targeted doesn’t really matter. Conscious, unconscious, the result is the same. For them, it’s racism.
^ I guess I’d use "prejudiced"v. “racist”.
@sorghum - thanks. I’d forgotten that part. I think I know all my neighbors by sight at least, but I can see that if you didn’t the initial call made sense.
There’s a rumor that a house down the block from us is being run as an AirBnB. They certainly haven’t let us know. I’m not too happy about it, but I haven’t seen any signs of it. The house is owned by a church and nobody ever seems to stay there long, but they mow the lawn and don’t seem to have any more cars than anyone else on the block. I’ve talked to occupants from time to time.
I think it’s worth making the decision between unconscious racial bias and true racism. I think the former is easier to cure than the latter. I know from time to time I’ve said things that have been taken the wrong way, and I’ve learned to recognize why what I’ve said was hurtful, even if not intentional. I think a lot of the racist incidents come out of fear - fear of the other. Many people have grown up in very segregated environments and react very differently than someone who has spent more time with people who don’t look exactly like themselves.
I’ll bet police departments would appreciate it if they received fewer calls from hypervigilant individuals who rely on their implicit biases to determine who is a threat so that the police would have more time to respond to actual crimes.
That’s a really good question. Not calling them racist seems to dismiss the behavior but calling them racist lumps them in with the skinhead variety and doesn’t seem to recognize that there are shades of racism. Perfect well meaning people, people who see themselves as allies and who act as such to POC, can still have racist attitudes. Plus people can receive an action as racist when there’s no racist intent, e.g., little white girls getting their hair braided in Jamaica or someone using the word “thug” without any awareness that it carries a racial connotation. Then there’s the whole question of whether POC can be racist…
My hope is that we can continue to have such honest conversations and to educate ourselves in order to narrow racial divides. I fear that in the current climate those divides are widening.
We need a richer vocabulary for discussing race and racism: racial anxiety (not wanting to be the only one in the room) is different that racial speculation (I wonder what their hair feels like) than racial hatred and animosity (I could X those d* Xs). I don’t know what I would call the racist need to call the police on a person of color (racial trialing and convicting? racial territoriality?). It needs a more specific name than prejudice given how prevalent it is.
Maybe it’s simantics, but the term “racial bias” has a much less severe connotation than “racist”.
Then there’s this lovely piece of humanity.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/09/us/south-carolina-alleged-murder-for-hire-plot/index.html
I can’t believe that when you see 3-4 women, during the day, loading suitcases into a car, it somehow becomes “strangers moving things out of a house”. It’s luggage and they’re not trying to hide anything! Why would anyone ever assume that they were anything other than houseguests?
Airbnb aside, why would anyone try to interfere with a neighbor’s obvious guests?