Racism keeps showing its ugly face.
Tuesday, Tom Austin, the managing partner of F2 Group, threatened to call police on a group of black entrepreneurs for using the gym amenities at WeWork, a company that provides shared workspaces.
It looks like Austin didn’t get the memo that the Mozaic East WeWork building in uptown Minneapolis is not a whites-only club. In the latest filmed incident of racial profiling gone viral, Austin is heard questioning if the men were tenants, asking which floor and office they belonged too. The group of men who own Top Figure, a Minneapolis-based social media and branding agency rightfully declined their information, which prompted Austin to say he would call 911.
Instead, Austin is heard on video calling a woman named Nicole, who is assumed to the building manager, and told her he was dealing with a bunch of people who he felt did not “appear” to belong there. He was then informed that the group were tenants of the building. During the video clip, you can hear one of the men say: “As you can see, we’re dealing with racism here.” The Top Figure team’s Instagram caption states they have been renting the office space for a year and a half.
As a result of his discrimination and assumptions that the group was trespassing, the white Venture Capitalist had his lease terminated with the building, Forbes reports.
Austin later told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he “should have handled it differently”, and it was “not my job to have done anything.” He claims if it were a group of women, he would have done the same thing, but only Austin knows the truth behind that claim. He also said, like everyone else in his shoes, that he was not being racist.
Stuart Ackerberg, CEO of Ackerberg Group, which owns the MoZaic East building, said he was still heartbroken from seeing the video of Floyd when he decided to terminate the lease.
“My heart hurts,” he told the Tribune. “This is not how we do business. … I’m alarmed by what I saw,” The Hill reports.
The incident follows too close behind Amy Cooper, a white woman who was filmed calling the police on Christian Cooper, an avid bird-watcher and black man in Central Park after he asked her to follow park rules and leash her dog. And Austin’s stint is geographically too close to the death of George Floyd, a black man who was filmed while a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled his knee into Floyd’s neck until he died. Yet, Colin Kaepernick still can’t kneel in protest.
Top Figure shared the video to their Instagram. It has received over 57, 000 likes and over 7,000 comments.
“We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day-to-day basis, and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation,” Top Figure’s Instagram caption read.
