Amy Cooper called the cops on Christian Cooper when he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. The confrontation shows the impact of still-widespread segregation.
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An ugly moment was caught on video in New York City’s Central Park over the holiday weekend: A white person threatened to call the police on a Black person for the high crime of asking her to respect the rules and leash her dog.
Amy Cooper was walking her dog in the Ramble section of Central Park on Monday morning, when she encountered Christian Cooper (no relation), an avid birdwatcher. Unleashed dogs are a specific problem, he told CNN. “That’s important to us birders because we know that dogs won’t be off leash at all and we can go there to see the ground-dwelling birds,” some of the 230 different species of birds that have been seen in the area. “People spend a lot of money and time planting in those areas as well. Nothing grows in a dog run for a reason.”
Amy Cooper, an executive at Franklin Templeton Investments, an asset management firm, had an immediate reaction to the correction. “I’m taking a picture and calling the cops,” she is heard saying in the video taken by Christian Cooper while struggling to contain her dog. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.”
It was a vile threat, and Christian Cooper clearly knew what she meant.
“I videotaped it because I thought it was important to document things,” he told CNN. “Unfortunately we live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where Black men are seen as targets. This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn’t having it.”
The summoning of the police to address the presence of a Black person, typically minding their own business, isn’t simply poor judgment or a temporary lapse in civility. It’s part of a broader tactic that white people have long used—often without thinking—to summon the state’s power on their behalf with the intent on restoring racial order.
The last few years have provided a master class in this behavior.
The most famous example was in April 2018, when Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson were arrested after a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia called the police to report them for, well, sitting in the store. “I have two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave,” she told the 911 dispatcher. That was not quite true; they had said they were waiting for a friend to arrive. The incident, caught on video by an alarmed bystander, forced Starbucks’ CEO Kevin Johnson to immediately apologize. A month later, the company closed some 8,200 stores for four hours of storewide diversity training, some of which they made public.
But the behavior is widespread. A white student living in a graduate dorm at Yale called campus police to confront and remove minding-their-own-business Black students not once, but twice. A white woman called the police to remove a Black man wearing socks in the swimming pool of their apartment complex. A white woman called the police on an 8-year-old Black girl selling water from a sidewalk shop without a permit. Another in Ohio called the police on a 12-year-old Black entrepreneur mowing a neighbor’s lawn. Police in California, some of whom were in a helicopter, surrounded four Black people as they loaded suitcases in their car after leaving an Airbnb. Neighbors thought it was a robbery. One of them was Bob Marley’s granddaughter, a filmmaker.
And most recently, a Black delivery driver and his coworker were blocked from leaving a gated community in Oklahoma City by a white man who insisted on knowing why they were there. Travis Miller documented the incident in a now-viral Facebook Live video, tears streaming down his face. “My intention was to cover myself in case he called my employer and said I did something other than what I did,” Miller told NBC News. He was also afraid that if the police were called, he’d be pegged as the problem.
And we all know what that means.
“Non-Black people in this country have been fed a steady diet of propaganda from their parents, their schools, their churches, and from the media that tells them that people of color, and particularly black folks and Latinx people are not to be trusted,” Jamilah Lemieux, a cultural critic and writer told The Guardian in 2018. “They’ve been taught that we are criminals, that we are violent that we are predators and think we need to be monitored.”
So tensions boil over quickly when Black people encroach typically “white spaces,” the boundaries of which have been in flux since the Civil Rights era, suggests Elijah Anderson, the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University.
His research shows that still-widespread segregation impacts the white and Black psyche in different ways. Progress aside, “[t]he wider society is still replete with overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, universities, workplaces, churches and other associations, courthouses, and cemeteries, a situation that reinforces a normative sensibility in settings in which Black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.” White people typically avoid Black space, he writes, but Black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.
And if they fail to navigate that space correctly, their existence may be threatened with the help of the state.
As we discuss sociology today, Amy Cooper is having different discussions. She had been put on administrative leave, after the viral video hit Twitter yesterday, making her a trending topic and temporarily crashing her employer’s website. Her rescue dog has also been surrendered to a shelter. She was even forced to “apologize.”
By press time, Amy Cooper had been fired. “Following our internal review of the incident in Central Park yesterday, we have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately. We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton,” the company said in a tweet. Next year, when something similar happens, her name will be evoked. In five years, her story will be part of someone’s Master’s thesis, a permanent part of a canon without end.
But Christian Cooper is still alive, and that’s the good news here. Despite the drama, he is determined to reclaim the Ramble as a public space available to all. When asked the obligatory, “do you forgive her” question, he responded: “If it’s genuine and if she plans on keeping her dog on a leash in the Ramble going forward, then we have no issues with each other.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
