Black professor speaks out about being racially profiled near campus
Last week, while he was on his lunch break, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design was racially profiled on campus, and now, he is speaking out about the experience.
Last week, while he was on his lunch break, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design was racially profiled on campus, and now, he is speaking out about the experience.
Steve Locke said that he noticed a police car following him as he was returning from getting a burrito for lunch.
“The policeman got out of the car, said, ‘Hey, my man,'” Locke said. “He had his hand on his weapon, so I automatically knew that something had happened and he wasn’t coming to talk to me as a citizen. He was coming to talk to me as a suspect.”
Despite the faculty ID around Locke’s neck, he was told that he matched the description of a robbery suspect.
“It was at this moment that I knew that I was probably going to die,” Locke wrote on his blog. “I am not being dramatic when I say this. I was not going to get into a police car. Â I was not going to present myself to some victim. Â I was not going let someone tell the cops that I was not guilty when I already told them that I had nothing to do with any robbery.”
Although eventually he was sent away, and the police did apologize for “screwing up your lunch break,” Locke knew he had to speak out about what happened.
“I am 52 years old. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan,” he told HuffPost Live. “A lot of my life has been organized around avoiding interactions with the police, but whenever I encounter the police, I understand that I’m encountering them differently than other citizens.”
