So these two very insensitive, discriminatory things happened.
First, a Brooklyn restaurant posted this sign outside of their super hipster establishment that serves super hipster pomegranate iced tea to apparently make white gentrifiers who have never endured harassment from police laugh, and black Brooklynites who have a storied past with the NYPD drop their jaws.
Read enraged. Because poking fun at one of the department’s most dehumanizing, racist, controversial and discriminative tactics created to police minority neighborhoods isn’t cute. Especially in Crown Heights, a neighborhood with rapidly changing demographics and landscape due to the gentrification of the once “undesirable” area.
Welcome to the whole of Brooklyn. Now, Chop Chop Grub Shop is apologizing for their insensitive “Stop and Frisk” jab.
From the Huffington Post:
“It was put up for a few days last week, and when we got a call from a customer who was offended by it we changed the sign,” Otis Lockett, the restaurant’s managing partner, told The Huffington Post on Thursday. “They put it in a social context that we didn’t consider.”
Nope. Probably wouldn’t occur to the posh bistro, given the practice disproportionately targets minorities.
Olive Demetrius, the 33-year-old woman who took the photo, said she was taken aback by the insensitivity of the sign. In her opinion, the sign was marketing pomegranate iced tea and breakfast offerings to the mostly white, affluent residents that have moved into her neighborhood over the last decade.
“I was offended and all I could think was ‘fuck you’ or ‘bitch ass hipster racism,’” Demetrius, a Brooklyn native who has lived in Crown Heights for 12 years, told HuffPost. “All for people who don’t have that happen to them — the young, white folks that have moved in the last five to seven years.”
Demetrius, who is black, said she posted a picture of the sign on Instagram and Facebook. From there, the shot was widely circulated after it was re-shared by community activist Imani Keith Henry.
“To put ‘stop and frisk’ in an advertisement about selling you a sandwich when we’re talking about people dying, people being put in chokeholds because they’re grilling, people being arrested for falling asleep,” Henry, who lives in nearby Flatbush, told HuffPost, “I just can’t fathom why anyone would think of this as a catchphrase.”
We couldn’t have said it better. Although we doubt anyone purchasing half a million dollar condos in a once affordable neighborhood would know too much about the historical para-militarization of black neighborhoods and the individuals and families destroyed because of it.
Moving on…
On Friday, an app that tells you how to avoid areas like Crown Heights pre-gentrification launched – and the creators couldn’t be more happy to present their racist, exclusionary technology.
Today is just the best. Stay tuned for a @sketchbegone announcement. #mobile #startup #popchampagne w @DHerrington pic.twitter.com/4SnXXbwY9y
— Allison McGuire (@CaliMcG) August 6, 2014
Yes. You read that right. SketchFactor is the name. And helping you avoid areas in your town that have yet to be gentrified with a bistro that serves racist jokes and pomegranate tea is the game.
From Crains New York:
SketchFactor, the brainchild of co-founders Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative “sketchiness” of certain areas in major cities. The app will launch on iTunes on Friday, capping off a big week for the startup, which was named as a finalist in NYC BigApps, a city-sponsored competition that promotes technologies designed to improve quality of life issues in New York City and government transparency.
“We understand that people will see this issue,” Ms. McGuire said. “And even though Dan and I are admittedly both young, white people, the app is not built for us as young, white people. As far as we’re concerned, racial profiling is ‘sketchy’ and we are trying to empower users to report incidents of racism against them and define their own experience of the streets.”
Just to reiterate. The app “is not built for us as young, white people.” We don’t believe you, you need more people.
Remember, we’ve been through this before. And GhettoTracker didn’t go over so well. Learn from your predecessors and have a seat please.
SOURCE: Huffington Post, Crains | PHOTO CREDIT: Facebook
