According to a new viral video, two black men were harassed by a white man in an Upper East Side apartment building. In the video, the man claims to have been a resident of the building for nearly 30 years, and repeatedly told the men to leave. One of the gentlemen moved to the building last year.
“What are you doing in my building? You don’t live here,” he said. “You don’t live here… I’ve never seen you before, I’ve been here 27 years.”
“While I was with my friend Cassius Flemming waiting for a Lyft ride on the first floor of the building that I have lived in since mid-December of last year, this man interrogated me about where I live,” wrote Chika Okafor, one of the gentlemen involved in the incident.
The man reportedly behaved in a similar manner towards a white woman and her family later in the day. In a video she shared, he yells, “Where are you from? Maybe you’re a little more re*****d than the average person.”
“To me, his behavior suggested that, one, because we were people of color we were a threat to their safety, and, two, because we are people of color we can’t afford to live in that type of apartment complex,” Okafor told The New York Times.
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