Editorials

Last week Bay Area stand-up comic W.Kamau Bell created a minor flap by blogging about the way he was dissed by Berkeley’s Elmwood Café. In brief, his wife and some women friends were lunching at a sidewalk table outside the restaurant while he was at the bookstore next door.

He approached them with a book in hand which he’d just bought and wanted to show to his wife. From the inside of the café, an employee tapped on the window and motioned him to go away, twice, accompanied by a scowl and some sort of verbal chastisement.

An odd story, and why should we care? Here’s why: Bell is Black, and everyone else in this story is white. And he’s a good storyteller: here’s the account on his blog. He makes the case, convincingly, that if he were a white husband speaking to his wife the café worker wouldn’t have gone after him as she did. 

She later was quoted as saying she thought he was trying to sell something to the white women or otherwise annoying them. Why did she think that? 

As it happens, the week before I had lunch at the very same café on the very same sidewalk with white women friends, and a male friend came over to speak to me. He even detached the rope the proprietors had installed to section off the part of the public sidewalk where their tables were so he could get closer to me.  

Surprise! No one said anything to him. He’s white, of course. 

It’s hard not to conclude that the woman’s suspicions of Bell, consciously or subconsciously, were motivated by her perception that he is African-American. It’s the Sesame Street question: which one of these is not like the other? As the odd man out, he’s inevitably suspect. 

Two articles took up the story. First to appear, on the Berkeleyside local news site, Comedian W. Kamau Bell reports being victim of racism at Berkeley’s Elmwood Café, by Tracey Taylor and Frances Dinkelspiel, and later in the San Francisco Chronicle, Even Berkeley not immune from the social disease of racism, a column by Chip Johnson (who himself is Black). 

What’s remarkable, and sobering, is reading the readers’ comments on Berkeleyside (at least 700 at last count). Many, what appears without counting to be the majority, are vitriolic, blaming Bell for playing the victim unjustifiably. Most of them, presumably, are from Berkeley residents, since the site is devoted to local Berkeley news and probably not widely read elsewhere. I recognized some familiar voices of the usual suspects among the surlier citizens of Berkeley who are thrilled to have a platform for their numerous grievances. The “I’m not a racist, but…” plaint runs throughout. (Johnson’s column got only a few comments.) 

Berkeley used to have a substantial percentage of African-American residents, 23.5% in 1970 (when the census still called them Negroes.) Their homes were largely segregated in the southwestern quadrant of the city—the Flatlands—to the extent that bussing for integrated schools was necessary. A fair number of middle-class Black people owned homes west of Martin Luther King Way, which was then called Grove Street, the boundary which could not be crossed. They were able to buy in this part of Berkeley more easily than they could in the more segregated outer suburbs of San Francisco, but most of the rest of Berkeley was off limits to Blacks and even Asians well into the 70s. 

In the last census in 2010 the proportion of Berkeley residents listed as “Black or African-American” had dropped to only 10%. The formerly Black neighborhoods are rapidly gentrifying. White home buyers are paying premium prices there as Bay Area real estate prices soar. 

Perhaps this decline in Black representation in the population has somehow caused the insensitivity of those commenting on Bell’s experience this week. Or maybe the surly white citizens are people who resent having to live in the former African-American ghetto because they can’t afford the pricier hillside homes. Whoever they are, they make it clear that racism is alive here, with or without Bell’s little encounter. 

What’s remarkable about Kamau Bell’s story is that, for anyone who is Black or even has talked to a few Black friends, it’s so unremarkable.  

Black people go through life in this country with a permanent cloud of suspicion hanging over them, with petty insults of the kind Bell chronicles a daily occurrence. We are all occasionally subjected to rude encounters like this, but for African-Americans it’s all the time.  

And it escalates in seriousness. The son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, a student at Yale, was recently subjected to a humiliating search at gunpoint on campus just because someone had spotted an African-American burglary suspect in the vicinity. What, do “they all look alike”? 

In Berkeley, just last September, eight police officers interrogated an interracial couple in a pizzeria for an hour on a Sunday afternoon in front of their child and a room full of shocked patrons for what turned out to be exactly nothing. The last time I checked, the city of Berkeley had not even responded to the white proprietor’s complaint about this unwanted police invasion. 

See, for the whole story: Even in Berkeley, Police Bully Citizens of Color. 

Recent protests have responded to the lethal extreme of this trajectory: the number of unarmed African-Americans who are shot on a regular basis by police. The worst instance recently was the kid in Cleveland, holding, just for a moment, a friend’s realistic toy gun, who was killed by a trigger-happy rookie cop. From the NY Times: In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One 

Melissa Bell spoke to the management of the Elmwood Café after the incident happened, and a different server apologized to her for what the co-worker had done. But her husband was still mad, too mad to participate in the discussion. 

When Bell put the story on his blog and people started asking questions, the owner of the Elmwood Café posted a temporizing statement on the café’s Facebook page. I called him the day the story came out, and he told me he was “horrified, appalled”, but had not spoken to the employee involved. 

To make a long story short, eventually various apologias were posted on the café’s website, though all of them had vanished as of this writing. At one point it was announced, somewhere, that the woman in question had been fired, though not at Bell’s request, after the owner questioned her about her actions. The Berkeley school district has offered to host a community discussion of the event. 

Some of the online commenters in the several venues opined that it was unfair to let the employee go for making an honest mistake. Though Bell has said repeatedly that he didn’t ask that she be fired, the letter writers are shedding buckets of crocodile tears over her termination. 

Her assumption that Bell was making trouble is understandable, though not defensible. What’s hard for many to grasp is that overt, conscious racism doesn’t have to be involved for stereotyping to cloud decision-making. Somehow, at the moment she rapped on the window, Kamau Bell must have looked threatening to her—even if it was all in her own head.  

Racism is not binary—it’s not the case that you’re either racist or you’re not. It’s a continuum, with a lot of irrational emotion buried beneath the surface. 

Nor, for that matter, is it true that all racial profiling reflects evil intent. But acting on unacknowledged racial preconceptions harms the person who is stereotyped regardless of motivation. A white man doing what Bell did would have been given the benefit of the doubt—Bell was an instant suspect. 

One question none of the participants have raised is that the table and chairs in question were set up on the sidewalk, effectively privatizing the public right of way. Should employees of small private businesses be allowed to order people they find annoying , for whatever reason, racial or otherwise, to clear off? 

Of course the management was right to let the woman go, because whatever the excuse she was rude to a customer, and that just won’t fly in a service business. The Elmwood Café in particular has a good-guy brand: fair trade coffee, profits to charity, the whole megillah—they don’t need this bad PR, even if the woman is merely officious by nature, regardless of her racial perceptions. 

This story is small potatoes compared to kids getting shot by police, which W. Kamau Bell surely knows. But when white people assume, consciously or unconsciously, that African-Americans are scary, it’s a slippery slope, one which all too often ends up with innocent Black people getting killed. 

Here in Berkeley, quite a few people do grasp this. That’s why a few hundred of them, especially University of California students, turned out on December 6 to demonstrate after Michael Brown was killed, only to be teargassed by the Berkeley police.  

Shamefully, the Berkeley City Council has yet to deal with that situation.  

They have postponed action on complaints from the demonstrators on three separate occasions for what’s now been two months, with no good excuse for doing so. It’s been promised (do you believe it?) that several proposals for modest reforms will really truly surely be taken up at the beginning of the council’s agenda on Tuesday, February 10.  

Maybe. Just to be sure, another protest march, this one to the council meeting, is being planned for Tuesday.