Another day brings another #LivingWhileBlack incident. An African-American student was confronted by a police officer after she only sat down to eat lunch during a work break at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts on Tuesday afternoon.
The racial profiling incident was sparked by a white college employee who reported the rising sophomore, who wasn’t identified by name, for having looked “out of place,” The Boston Globe reported. The employee’s description of the student — similar to that used to refer to people of color who are wrongfully deemed “suspicious” for being in majority-White spaces and neighborhoods — was completely wrong.
A campus police officer was called to a campus common room and quickly discovered there was “nothing suspicious about the student’s presence” at Smith, which is a private women’s college. The incident is another example of police being summoned to a scene to only investigate a Black person for living their daily life. Wow.
Did the employee take a minute to even think how calling the cops would affect the student who posed no threat?
The student, who said the employee thought she was a “suspicious Black male,” revealed her feelings about the horrible incident on Facebook. She couldn’t believe that she was targeted while working as a residential advisor and teaching assistant.
“I am blown away at the fact that I cannot even sit down and eat lunch peacefully,” she wrote in one post. “I did nothing wrong, I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anyone. All I did was be black. It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”
An investigation has been launched into the incident, and the caller’s identity has not been released by the college.
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This Black Student Couldn’t Even Eat Her Food Without A Cop Being Called On Her was originally published on newsone.com