A Black employee at Google was wrongly removed from the campus after security didn’t believe he worked there.
Whether we’re sleeping in our own dorm building, going to Starbucks, or performing our everyday jobs, living while being Black seems to always be a crime. That sentiment continues to be the case, as a security guard at Google removed Black employee Angel Onuoha from the premises because he didn’t believe Onuoha worked for the company.
On September 20, Onuoha, an associate product manager for Google, described the incident in a Twitter post.
“Riding my bike around Google’s campus and somebody called security on me because they didn’t believe I was an employee,” said Onuoha in his tweet’s caption. “Had to get escorted by two security guards to verify my ID badge.”
Two days after that, Onuoha tweeted that security “ended up taking my ID badge away from me later that day and I was told to call security if I had a problem with it.” He added that this was after he was held up “30 minutes causing [him] to miss [his] bus ride home.”
In a statement provided to Forbes, Google said it is the “employee’s concerns very seriously.”
“We learned that the employee was having issues with his badge due to an administrative error and contacted the reception team for help,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “After they were unable to resolve the issue, the security team was called to look into and help resolve the issue.”
It continued: “More broadly, one step we’ve taken recently to decrease badging incidents is to make clear that employees should leave investigating these kinds of access concerns to our security team. Our goal is to ensure that every employee experiences Google as an inclusive workplace and that we create a stronger sense of belonging for all employees.”
