We scroll our calendars back to April, when an employee of a Starbucks in Philadelphia illustrated her corporate loyalty and racial superstition by calling the police to report that two men—later identified as the twenty-three-year-old real-estate agents Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, who were at the coffee shop waiting for a third associate—had not bought anything and were refusing to leave. The men were arrested; handcuffs make anyone look guilty of something. But the employee’s version of events, which may have easily been established as the official record, was soon eclipsed by footage of the incident, uploaded by a writer named Melissa DePino. Her vantage point, from the table at which she is still seated, is that of the suddenly activated witness. Her video shows a riled white customer in the foreground, coming to the defense of the men being arrested. He asks an officer, “What did they do? What did they do?”
The composition accelerates empathy: the third-party outrage, expressed by the white male citizen, who is assumed to be more sober-headed than the always aggrieved black one, legitimizes our own in a way that the men’s first-person testimony would not have. The video crystallized the way in which unnecessary 911 calls precipitate the kinds of police interaction that can end catastrophically for black and brown people. It also showcased the banality of racism: it was a reminder that coffee shops, with all the dawdling they encourage, are a “white space.” Later, after the Philadelphia police commissioner retracted his defense of the arrest, DePino told NPR’s “Code Switch,” “I know these things happen, but I’ve never actually physically witnessed it myself.”
Many other recent contributions to this American genre have been recorded by victims themselves—that is, by black people whose innocuous behavior has inspired a person to call the police on them. A hallmark of the videos is the filmmaker’s narration, which tends to range from angry to bemused. The point-of-view shots provide a counterbalance to those that we see in footage from police body cams and security cameras, which masquerade as unbiased. Whatever the tone, the urgency of publicizing the hazards of “doing X while black”—barbecuing, swimming, sleeping—causes cell phones to tremble. The month after the event at Starbucks, Sarah Braasch, a graduate student at Yale in the philosophy department, called the campus authorities on her dorm mate, Lolade Siyonbola, for napping in the common room. Siyonbola live-streamed the incident on Facebook. In one video segment, she carefully relayed what was happening as the police interrogated her, and verified her student I.D. “I am not going to be harassed,” she told the officers. Her calm was unnerving.
