“So the fact that even the people of color who work for Public Safety cannot, or find it difficult to, imagine that black students and certain other students of color are actually Columbia students, in my opinion, points to a much, much larger understanding of who a Columbia student is.”

One student who identifies as Dominican, and who asked to remain anonymous, had brought a load of darks downstairs to the laundry room in Woodbridge Hall when he realized he’d forgotten his Columbia ID and couldn’t swipe to pay for a wash cycle. In a bind, he asked another student (who was white) for a favor: He explained what had happened, and wondered if that student would swipe his ID at the machine, charging $1.25 to his Flex account in exchange for two dollars in cash—he did this, he says, “with the money very clearly out and in my hand, ’cause you know how it is on this campus. You know what they’re gonna assume.”

Simple enough. The other student obliged, made 75 cents, and our student loaded his washer. He was waiting for his cycle to finish in the computer lab down the hall when a Public Safety officer walked into the room and asked for his ID—which, he explained, he didn’t have on him. “Whatever we need to do to clear this up,” the student said, “I’m fine with it.”

Upstairs at the front desk, where his identity checked out, he asked the officer why he was being checked for his ID in a residence hall that he couldn’t have entered without one. “He was like, ‘Basically, we got a call saying someone was downstairs in the basement begging for money.’ Like I was panhandling. Or some bullshit,” he says.

This student, like many students of color, says that getting stopped like this is routine to him. “The general context is: it’s dark, I’m walking through campus—in a building sometimes, outside sometimes—and it’s just like ‘Can I see your ID?’ Just like that. I’ll be sitting down studying sometimes, table set up with my books, they’ll come over. ‘Hey, I just need to see your ID.’ And I show them, and they go off,” he says. But the student said this encounter felt so egregious that he decided to visit the Public Safety office in Low for the first time to complain about what had happened.

“The dude was like, ‘Maybe you just need to have Flex on your card next time.’ And I cut him off. I was like, ‘Wait, wait, stop right there. Listen. I’m coming here to talk to you about how somebody, obviously on the basis of prejudice or racism, made a false allegation and is making me pay the price of inconvenience to accommodate his prejudices. And you’re trying to talk to me about some technicality?’” he says.

The hardest part of the argument, he says, is that he was having it with a black man. “That’s what was the worst, not for anything other than the fact that you should know,” he says. “You should be privy to this. You don’t have an excuse not to know about racism.”

Imani Brown, a black graduate from the Columbia College class of 2014 who spent her time on campus organizing with Agbabiaka as a member of SAMI, says that she nurses this sort of disappointment by reminding herself of the overarching, structural forces that can lead so many people who “look like us” to participate in anti-black policing. “In terms of the interests of Columbia,” she offers, “there’s an interest in keeping outside people—the people of Harlem—out. So the fact that even the people of color who work for Public Safety cannot, or find it difficult to, imagine that black students and certain other students of color are actually Columbia students, in my opinion, points to a much, much larger understanding of who a Columbia student is.”

“Which,” she clarifies, “is white, and privileged, and so on. And that understanding isn’t being generated by the individual officers on Public Safety. That popular and that public imagination of what a Columbia student is, I think, points to a failure on an institutional level to incorporate people of color into the University in any meaningful way.”