Award-winning Black screenwriter of 'The Bear,' pulled from a train & arrested after white woman objects to his presence [View all]
Alex O'Keefe, an award-winning Black screenwriter known for his work on FX's 'The Bear,' was recently detained by police after being pulled from an MTA train heading to Connecticut. The incident occurred when a white woman on board complained about O'Keefe's posture, leading to his arrest without even being questioned by the woman who reported him. The incident has sparked discussions about racial bias and the treatment of Black individuals in law enforcement. O'Keefe's experience reflects a troubling pattern of white individuals weaponizing the police system, driven by racial bias and the assumption that Black people are inherently criminal, even when the targets are law-abiding citizens. Black Enterprise
__According to a video posted to O’Keefe’s official Instagram account on Sept. 18, “I was arrested on the MTA train to Connecticut today, pulled off, handcuffed, and detained. An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train. While waiting for the police to arrive, the old Karen’s friend said, ‘You’re not the minority anymore.'” O’Keefe does not indicate where he was traveling from to get to Connecticut.
Vesla Mae Weaver, a Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of several books on race and democracy, noted in a 2018 Vox op-ed that white individuals repeatedly use the police as a personal security force because the tactic continues to be effective, a pattern reflected in O’Keefe’s experience.
“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…The Yale student (a white student who called the police on a napping Black student at the university in 2018) was not, as far as we know, attempting to thwart police from discovering her own wrongdoing,” Weaver wrote. “But her enlistment of police was racially strategic, meant to marshal existing stereotypes of Blacks to reconfigure her space and dispense with a Black person. It fits a societal algorithm that blackness itself is suspect.”
https://www.blackenterprise.com/alex-okeefe-screenwriter-pulled-train-karen/
His Instagram post includes four slides. The first slide is a video, where O’Keefe films law enforcement officers. In the video, he says, “You’re gonna arrest the one Black dude on the train, because this white woman said she didn’t like the way I was sitting on the train.”
In the video, he films a woman whom he points at. The woman is elderly and wearing a face mask.
“You call the police to arrest the one Black dude on the train,” he says in the video, adding, “I haven’t done anything illegal.”
In the caption of the Instagram post, he wrote:
“The police told me to leave the train, I refused and asked what was I doing illegally. They said I was disturbing the peace by not leaving the train. They pulled me off the train and arrested me without even talking to the Karen who reported the one black person on the train. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Only black folks stayed nearby and recorded the arrest. When I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a statement from the woman who complained they eventually released me. This country is growing more psycho by the day. What will you do about it?”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-bear-writer-arrested-on-train-after-complaint-from-white-woman/ar-AA1N32W1
https://www.instagram.com/dotgov/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=cc7fa9a4-b521-44b3-85bf-e78c22597fbe
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