Portland Hotel cares 2 employees who called the police on a black guest
A hotel in Portland, Oregon, announced on Saturday it fired two employees to mistreat a black guest, which they asked to leave last week before calling the police.
Jermaine Massey, 34, said he was talking to his mother on the phone in the lobby of the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel last Saturday when a security guard denied him asking if he was a guest and what his room number was.
Massey said even though he showed the guard's hotel key, the guardian told him to leave, and a manager called the police and accused Massey of talking.
In an Instagram post, Massey said he thought he was targeted by the hotel staff because of his run.
"It's never okay to discriminate guests for the color of their skin and predict them based on your own bias against that race," wrote Massey.
Read more : A hotel in Portland called the police on a black guest who took a phone call in the lobby
The hotel apologized to Massey in his tweet on Saturday.
"DoubleTree by Hilton has zero tolerance for racism," the hotel said it had "completed 2 employees involved in the abuse of Mr. Massey and working on Diversity and Inclusion Experts. Hilton strongly regrets Mr. Massey."
Massey talked about the incident on CNN on Friday, saying he felt hurt and humiliated by the situation.
"I'm a person at the end of the day, just like everyone else. And I deserve respect and fair treatment, and I didn't receive it on Saturday," Massey said. "I think there is a lot of perception about black men, especially that we are threats, and we are harmful, and we are just horrible individuals. And that bias affects these situations and it is harmful to us as people."
The police call on DoubleTree is just the latest in a number of cases where white people have called the police on black people for seemingly innocent behavior, causing viral violence and raising concerns about racial disturbances.
In October, a white woman in the Brooklyn called the police of a black child and she accused him of sexual assault, later admitted she had been mistaken. In April, two young black men were removed from a Starbucks in Philadelphia by the police as they sat in the cafe waiting for a business meeting.
In May, a graduate student at Yale University was taught by the police after a fellow student reported her to sleep in the common room in the dormitory. In June, a black firefighter in uniform was reported to the police when he carried out a city-based inspection of homes in a neighborhood in Oakland, California.
