For the past few weeks, national attention has focused heavily on issues of racial profiling after a number of high-profile incidents involving white people calling the police on people of color spread on social media.
Now a video of a man threatening to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Spanish-speaking employees in a New York restaurant has gone viral — and is creating some trouble for the man at the center of the video.
In the video, an unidentified man can be seen yelling at the employees of a Fresh Kitchen in Manhattan, berating them for speaking Spanish to customers.
“Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English,” he says to one employee in the video. “This is America.”
When other people in the lunch spot laugh, the man threatens to call ICE, which has the power to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. It’s important to note that there’s no apparent reason for him to think that the workers are in the country illegally except for their race.
“My guess is they’re not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country,” he says. “They have the balls to come here and live off of my money? I pay for their welfare; I pay for their ability to be here. The least they could do, the least they could do is speak English.”
It’s worth noting that his assumption is incorrect. Though the workers’ status in this case is unknown, research shows that undocumented workers in the US frequently have money withheld from their paychecks, which means that many of them are actually supporting social welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security while getting none of the benefits in return.
According to the website Gothamist, video of the exchange was first posted to Facebook by Edward Suazo. Suazo says that his wife and her friend were speaking with a cashier when the man began yelling at them for talking in Spanish.
“What a big man talking down to couple of women and a helpless employee. I wish someone tells me I can’t speak in my native language!” Suazo wrote in a Facebook post. “First of all they wasn’t talking to you!”
Twitter users quickly identified the man and are calling for his disbarment
Intercept columnist Shaun King posted the video of the man on Twitter on May 16 and asked his 962,000 followers to help identify him.
In the hours since, users on Twitter have identified the man as Aaron Schlossberg, a New York attorney who has touted his fluency in Spanish on the website for his law office.
Other users have uploaded videos of Trump rallies where they say the attorney was present, and a report from BuzzFeed noted that Schlossberg has been seen or recorded making racist comments at multiple points over the past two years. According to the New York Daily News, Schlossberg is a registered Republican, and several outlets have noted that Schlossberg’s law office donated to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump has repeatedly called for the deportation of undocumented immigrants and has pushed for stricter immigration enforcement since taking office.
Schlossberg’s law office has since been flooded with negative reviews online, as well as calls for him to be disbarred. On Thursday, the company that leased office space to Schlossberg terminated its agreement with the lawyer. That same day, US Rep. Adriano Espaillat and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. filed a disciplinary grievance in the New York state court system against Schlossberg.
“The audacity to profile and verbally assault innocent bystanders and customers in a public commercial location is a violation of our civil society,” Espaillat and Diaz wrote. “We watched Aaron’s video and we were disgusted.”
Schlossberg has yet to comment publicly on the controversy.
Racism in public spaces isn’t new — but recent incidents are fueling a desire for consequences
Schlossberg’s outburst—and the strong public backlash to it—comes amid a seemingly endless wave of recent high-profile incidents in which white people have called the police on people of color. And one thing that stands out is how minor some of the alleged offenses are — and that someone feeling suspicious or uncomfortable is seemingly enough to warrant calling law enforcement.
It’s tempting to think that this recent wave of incidents is proof that this is a new phenomenon, but that’s definitely not the case.
As many black writers have pointed out recently, people of color have long been subject to racial profiling in public, and private, spaces. If anything has changed, it’s that social media and the ubiquity of cellphone cameras have made it easier for black and brown people to share footage of confrontations and arrests in real time.
It’s a reminder that people of color are subject to arbitrary social expectations and heightened scrutiny. And it’s a phenomenon that academics argue is more likely to happen in places where people of color, especially black people, are in the minority.
That scrutiny is common in what Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson refers to as “white spaces,” areas where black people and other people of color are often not present or exist in a limited number. Anderson notes that the consequences of entering these spaces can be severe for a person of color.
But these incidents also may point to something else — like the desire to preserve racial hierarchies by casting people of color as deviants that can be removed at any moment.
It’s at the core of why a white Yale student called the police on a napping black classmate soon after telling her “you don’t belong here.” It’s why Nordstrom employees in Missouri saw no problem with calling the police on a group of black teens, accusing them of shoplifting even as they tried to purchase items. It’s why a white woman could call the cops on a black real estate investor and then shout angrily at those very officers when they told her to leave the man alone. It’s why Schlossberg could see fit to threaten people with ICE simply because they spoke Spanish.
It’s concerning that people see fit to call or threaten people with law enforcement officers — wielding the police as a weapon in situations when they’re not actually needed and against communities more likely to face police violence. “The breezy deployment of police by whites at Yale, at Starbucks, Walmart, and in other social spaces vividly reveals how white people use law enforcement to exert control over their fellow black Americans,” Johns Hopkins professor Vesla Mae Weaver recently wrote for Vox. It’s an action that comes with very little cost for the person who makes the call.
And as the media continues to shine a spotlight on these incidents, it’s sparking a broader conversation about what the consequences should look like. In the absence of a ready answer, people — like the individuals who contributed to a GoFundMe to send a mariachi band to Schlossberg’s office — are creating their own.
One thing is clear: racial profiling incidents — and the fallout from them — do not seem to be going away.
