Is that circus music we hear in the background? Jezebel is reporting that a party for black Harvard and Yale alums at a Boston club this weekend was shut down just after 11 p.m. Why? The club owner was concerned that a long line of black people outside would make the club look bad. What is this? A bad version of the Sixth Sense: "I see black people." A group of recent graduates had sold tickets in advance for a party at a new Boston club, Cure Lounge, to follow Saturday's Harvard-Yale game. By 10:30 p.m., though, club management freaked out and claimed that it had seen "local gangbangers" around, despite the strict guest-list policy implemented by organizers. You mean to tell us, with all of that intellectual capital in the area, that club owners could not tell the difference between Harvard alums and gangbangers? We bet management can tell the difference between white Harvard alums and the so-called locals. What were they afraid of? Someone whipping out a black American Express card and slamming it down too hard on the bar? Or wait, maybe knocking someone in the head with a doctoral dissertation?
Initially, management demanded that guests show student IDs — not exactly practical given that it was a party aimed at alums — and then eventually shut down the entire club. "We were perceived as a threat because of our skin color," wrote one organizer, Michael Beal, in an e-mail. "I am further dismayed that after having spent the last few hours with the club owner, I do not believe him to be a racist, which only adds to my consternation around what this event says about race relations in our country." Not racist? That's pretty generous. We'll just call it something else: stupidity. But this is a town that can't tell when a well-known black professor is entering his own home and when a group of black students are chilling on the green. We're sure that's not racism, either.
Read more, and the e-mail in its entirety, at Jezebel.com.