How did soggy socks become a police matter?
All this over a pair of soggy socks. In a video making the rounds on social media, one in a rapidly growing compilation of videos of white people calling the police on African-Americans for nothing, Erica Walker, the manager of Riverset Apartments on Mud Island, got bent out of shape over a man dipping his sock-clad feet in the Memphis complex’s pool.
Walker told the man, Kevin Yates, was enjoying the pool along with his girlfriend and Riverset resident, Camry Porter, and her god children, that his socks weren’t proper pool attire, and he needed to remove them.
Porter, however, questioned why she was singling them out – they were the only African-Americans in the pool on July 4th – for enforcing a rule that wasn’t spelled out and that she couldn’t clearly explain.
Walker escalated the exchange when she called the police. Porter said Walker accused her of “disturbing the peace” – code that is often used to portray African-Americans who stand up for themselves as menacing.
Porter, who said the incident ruined her day, left with Yates and the children. But that incident ruined much more for Walker – she was fired after the video that Porter posted went viral. This was all so unnecessary. Technically, cotton sock fibers can clog pool filters - although it’s hard to imagine that Yates’ wetting part of his feet on the pool’s edge could take out an entire filter in an afternoon. One could also argue that his socks could release germs and bacteria into the pool.
But, for that matter, so could Walker’s feet. In the video, she’s seen talking to the police in her bare feet, standing on the pavement. If she stepped into the water afterwards, she could have put bacteria into it.
And even if Walker didn’t get back into the pool, I’m sure many people were walking around barefoot and jumping back into the water. So, was she policing those folks, too? What Walker should have done, if the soggy socks irked her that much, was leave Porter and Yates alone. Then for future reference, distribute a memo specifying the pool attire and the rationale for it – and apply those rules to everyone.
But, given the fact that Walker called the police on Porter and Yates, it seems she didn’t just want the socks gone.
She wanted them gone.
And her actions add to a particularly odious history of white people finding ways to exclude black people from pools and swimming areas.
For decades, African-Americans were banned from municipal pools, and Memphis closed its public pools for six years rather than allow black people to use them. In later years, as white people fled to suburbs and gated, apartment communities, they avoided the public pools by building backyard and residential pools.
Yet while many African-Americans once had little access to those private pools, that’s now changing. But the attitudes of white people who don’t want to be in the water with them apparently haven’t.
This was evident in 2015, when police were summoned to a pool party in McKinney, Texas, after white residents said the African-American youths who were invited there didn’t belong, and were told to “go back to Section 8 housing.”
It was evident on June 24, when a South Carolina woman, dubbed by social media as #PoolPatrolPatty hit a black teenager, who had been invited by a friend to swim at the neighborhood pool, and threatened to call the police on them. She told him he didn’t belong, and hurled racial slurs at them.
The police wound up arresting her. And she lost her job.
And it was evident on July 4th when a North Carolina man, dubbed by social media as #IDAdam, called the police on a black woman resident for refusing to show him identification as she and her son used the pool in their gated community.
There was no requirement for residents to show identification, and when the woman’s key card opened the door to the pool complex, he refused to apologize. He lost his job, too. While President Donald Trump has hyped up a hateful atmosphere in which racists feel more emboldened to racially profile African-Americans and Latinos, the truth is that this disdain that some white people have for black people who share pools with them existed long before Trump.
The good news, though, is that their actions are being outed in video and on social media.
And what Walker should learn from all this is that calling the police on black people for doing nothing, or for being in a space to which some white people think only they are entitled to, isn’t getting them the outcomes they want.
Not unless those outcomes are unemployment and ridicule.