What's Your Emergency?: White Women and the Policing of Public Space

Abstract

766 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Justin LOUIS Mann What’s Your Emergency?: White Women and the Policing of Public Space On Tuesday, May 29, 2018, Starbucks closed eight thousand stores so that its nearly one hundred seventy-five thousand employees could undergo racial bias training. The company scheduled the training after a Philadelphia store manager, a white woman with a history of calling the police on black customers, called 9-1-1 on Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson. The arrest sparked outrage when video of the incident was posted on social media (Melissa DePino, a customer in the coffee house at the time, filmed the arrest and posted the video to Twitter where it was shared four million times in forty-eight hours). Although different from the types of police encounters that have dominated news reports— encounters that often end in the murder of black people—this episode, and the many others like it that have come to light in the months since, is equally important to understanding contemporary race relations in the United States. Here and in other incidents in which white people, especially white women, make false reports to the police accusing black people of criminal activity where none is present, gender often plays a pivotal role in producing notions of fear and safety. In this essay, I am most interested in how discourses of security and rights enable and sublimate racism, encouraging white women to call the police on black people. The implications of such acts are magnified in a context where police encounters often end in the violent death of innocent “suspects.” News and Views 767 I also want to consider the unique response engendered by social media, in which accusers are lampooned and turned into memes. In the time since Nelson and Robinson were arrested, numerous other incidents in which police were called on innocent black people have been reported in the press. Although recounting all of these incidents would be impossible—especially because we might imagine that each story that garners media attention eclipses countless others that do not—a few examples reveal a compelling set of consistencies. At Yale University and more recently at Smith College, white female students called police on black students who were using common areas to study or sleep. A white woman called the police on Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, Donisha Prendergast, and Komi-Oluwa Olafimihan as they moved out of their Airbnb, and former Obama-administration staffer Darren Marten was questioned by police while he moved into his apartment in New York City. In Pennsylvania, a white man called the police on five black women while they golfed. His complaint: the women were playing too slowly.1 A woman in Oakland called the police on two black men who were barbequing in a public park in Lake Merritt. This incident was also filmed and posted to the internet where it went viral, with viewers dubbing the woman #BBQBecky. Her image was also digitally edited so that she appears standing behind Martin Luther King on the steps of 1. See Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., “A Black Yale Student Fell Asleep in Her Dorm’s Common Room. A White Student Called Police,” The Washington Post, May 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/05/10/ablack -yale-student-fell-asleep-in-her-dorms-common-room-a-white-studentcalled -police/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e7cac4497128; “‘All I Did Was Be Black’: Someone Called the Police on a Student Lying on a Dorm Couch,” The Washington Post, August 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news /grade-point/wp/2018/08/05/all-i-did-was-be-black-someone-called-the-policeon -a-student-lying-on-a-dorm-couch/?utm_term=.d0f1afbe4e75; Patricia Mesachio, “Bob Marley’s Granddaughter Donisha Prendergast Demands Police Protocol Changes After Airbnb Run-In,” Billboard, May 2018, https:// www.billboard.com/articles/news/8455886/bob-marley-granddaughter-donisha -prendergast-airbnb; Julica Jacobo and Erica Y King, “‘Profiling Is Real’: Former Obama Staffer Mistaken as Burglar While Moving into New York City Apartment,” ABC News, May 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics /profiling-real-obama-staffer-mistaken-burglar-moving-york/story?id=54877597; Christina Caron, “5...