Earlier in the month, a video went viral of Alexander McNab being harassed by six campus cops at Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University in New York City. The video caused outraged by staff and factuality, but one student claims him being stopped had nothing to do with race.
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In a piece for the Columbia Beacon, a student, who describes herself as a “(very) light-skinned Jewish woman,” named Morgan Raum, wrote, “I would much prefer Barnard Public Safety officers prioritize safety rather than political correctness. The fact of the matter is an adult male entered a closed women’s college campus after 11 p.m. and repeatedly refused to show his identification to Public Safety officers, despite admitting that he knew about the rule. To be honest, I’m upset he was allowed to get as far as Milstein before the officers took action.”
Raum fails to acknowledge Columbia University and Barnard so there are always men on campus.
Raum, deciding to make a clear racial profiling about her, also wrote that it was just about him being a man, “I can’t help but feel that while Alexander McNab may have been ‘profiled,’ in all likelihood it was due to his being a male student on a women’s college campus after 11PM who repeatedly refused to show his identification.”
How unfortunate that Raum is being told what someone’s experience is as a Black man on the camus and Raum is saying it doesn’t exist.
In case you missed it, McNab refused to show his ID to security officers who reportedly allow White students to enter Barnard’s main gate without showing ID but demand identification from students of color. He followed into wha’s called the Milstein Center. Two of the officers pinned him down to a counter — even after he handed them his identification, another fact the “very light-skinned” Raum fails to acknowledge.
“I didn’t violate anybody. Get your hands off of me,” McNab says to the security officers.
After looking at McNab’s ID card, one of the officers responds, “Let’s walk outside.”
The student told the newspaper that he feared going outside with the officers and wanted to stay inside the building where there were witnesses.
Instead of examining his id and allowing him to go, the officers confiscated McNab’s card, saying they needed to verify that he was an “active” Columbia student.
“For context: Columbia students have access to Barnard libraries. After 11 p.m., students are supposed to show their IDs to public safety before entering campus. But this rule is loosely enforced and hardly followed. I have always just nodded to the officer. Nothing like this,” Andrew Wang, who identified himself as a Columbia student, wrote in his tweet below that includes a video of the incident.
As of now, the security officers are reportedly still on leave and Barnard is hiring an independent investigator.
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Sounds About White! Student Downplays Black Classmate At Barnard College Being Racially Profiled was originally published on newsone.com
