5 Feet of Fury

The Invisible Man, Redux

As the emailer notes, to his credit, the club owner wasn’t “racist”, whatever that means anymore.

The club owner responded logically and rationally to a lifetime supply of sensory evidence and personal experience, thinking he was protecting his investment.

Note, too, that the party organizer himself acknowledges the real (if only hinted at) problem:

…the reason we did the party on a pre-sold basis with strict admittance based solely on the guest list was to guarantee that the only attendees were Harvard and Yale alumni, grad students and their close friends and to ensure that no “bad seeds” could contaminate our party.

No “bad seeds” showed up. That didn’t matter.

Decades of witnessing bad behaviour by young black men overwhelmed the club owner, upon what had to be an already profoundly stressful occasion: the opening night of the business he’d worked so hard to get off the ground.

He reacted pre-emptively out of fear.

Sadly well-founded fear.

So the headline should really read:

“Mere thought of young black hoodlums ruins party for everyone”