Walking While Black: Viral Video Shows ‘Child’ Racially Profiled, Threatened In Florida Community, Mom Says
Source: tiktok.com/@qweenie333
Video footage going viral on social media shows appears to show a young Black male racially profiled before being threatened with violence by one of several non-Black men stalking and accusing him of the non-crime of walking in a Florida neighborhood in which he and his mother say they live.
The victim’s mother posted the video her son filmed on TikTok to ask for the public’s help and to express her relief that nothing worse happened to him during that unfortunate encounter in a residential community in the southwestern Florida city of Sarasota.
In the footage, the men can be seen and heard accusing the young Black male of not living in that community and implying that he has no business being there. He tells them repeatedly he lives there, too, but they don’t believe him and continue following him down a street.
The situation boiled over when one of the men following him appeared to angrily reach into a car and retrieve a gun before another neighbor held him back.
The incident took place last week on the morning after Hurricane Milton made landfall and knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands of residents in Florida, according to the unidentified young Black male’s mother. It was that circumstance in part that led him to begin walking in his neighborhood, his mother wrote in a TikTok post that included the video footage.
The mother provided the “back story” for context to the incident she said lasted for more than 10 minutes:
The morning aftermath of hurricane Milton my son wanted to walk the neighborhood to talk to his girlfriend on his phone, because we didn’t have power so his service was bad in the house. THIS is what he had to deal with. Even after telling these men he lives here they were not satisfied with his answer and continue to harass him.. this was not a 1 minute altercation, my son was followed for over 10 minutes dealing with this. I am so happy he recorded every moment, and thankful my child is still here. But I need to know how is it OK. I do not want to live in a community that does not welcome me and my children because [of] the color of our skin.
Watch the video she shared below:
@qweenie333 TikTok, I really need some help, what you see here is my child being racially profiled, and followed by four grown men all because he was walking around OUR neighborhood… I guess we look like we don’t belong in a upscale neighborhood but Here is a little back story: The morning aftermath of hurricane Milton my son wanted to walk the neighborhood to talk to his girlfriend on his phone, because we didnt have power so his service was bad in the house. THIS is what he had to deal with. Even after telling these men he lives here they we’re not satisfied with his answer and continue to harass him.. this was not a 1 minute altercation, my son was followed for over 10 minutes dealing with this. I am so happy he recorded every moment, and thankful my child is still here. But I need to know how is it OK. I do not want to live in a community that does not welcome me and my children because the color of our skin.#blacktiktok #blacktiktokcommunity #blm #blacklivesmatter #blacktiktok #helpme #isthisok
Internet sleuth That Danesh Guy later claimed to have identified the man who went to reach into a vehicle conspicuously as Stephen Carega, whose social media profiles include photos that bear an uncanny resemblance to the man in the video. That includes a LinkedIn page and Facebook account, both of which were live on Tuesday but had been deactivated as of Wednesday morning.
Source: LinkedIn screenshot
The situation was eerily similar to the circumstances that led to Ahmaud Arbery being chased by racist white men in a Georgia subdivision before he was publicly lynched and shot to death in the middle of a road in broad daylight while a willing accomplice recorded the entire incident.
Luckily, that’s not how things turned out in Sarasota last week.
Walking while Black
The concept of Black people being targeted simply for walking is not a new one.
In 2022, a North Carolina prosecutor declined to bring charges against an off-duty police officer for shooting and killing a Black man who was described by a witness as “just walking home” when he was shot in Fayetteville.
In 2019, a newly reelected sheriff in Jacksonville, Florida, upheld his police department’s practice of targeting African American pedestrians for tickets despite a study released in 2017 that found officers disproportionately enforce the city’s stringent pedestrian safety laws in the Black community—not in areas with high pedestrian fatality rates—and ticket African American pedestrians disproportionately for obscure violations.
In 2018, a white woman shot her gun at 14-year-old Brenna Walker after he missed his school bus and went looking for help in Rochester Hills, Michigan. When he knocked on the woman’s front door, she began shooting at him because she thought that he was going to rob her house.
And in 2015, an encounter between a Texas university dean and police caused backlash after the dean claimed she was stopped for “walking while Black.” University of North Texas journalism dean Dorothy Bland was taking her morning stroll when she was approached by two police officers in Corinth, Texas. The officers informed Bland that she was impeding traffic and advised her to walk on the other side of the street so she could see oncoming vehicles. Bland accused the officers of racially profiling her.
This is America.
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