as undoubtedly up to something undesirable?

Would they have made the same assumption about a man of another race approaching a table of white women?

It's an affluent section of Berkeley. The neighborhoods with more AAs are about a mile west on Ashby. But still, it's Berkeley. There have to be some AA professors at Cal who live there.

This was caused partially through housing policy, and I personally think that it was deliberate -as racism was implicit in the current (Democrat!) political regime's hostility toward low income housing. The current mayor has maxed out the 4 term limit, and there has been gerrymandering and other attempts to get the "lefties" off the City Council so the city can be developed in a more "business friendly" way. But the things that were unfriendly to business were related to poverty, so the Big Secret Plan was probably to cut off services for poverty so Berkeley would stop attracting "poor" people and simultaneously lower business taxes by reducing services. Demographics changed accordingly.

Of course the black man wandering through Elmwood was assumed to be an outsider from Oakland, here to panhandle.

The question is: will Berkeley's City Leaders ever be called to moral account for what they did?

Ps. I got the 8% figure from a Berkeley City Council meeting just a few weeks ago.

PPs. This might be tangentially related. I also caught the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce giving seminars on how business owners could work with cheap International Virtual Assistants, when they aren't even making an effort toward consolidating job listings for people in Berkeley. I sent the Chamber of Commerce an inquiry about these entry level jobs that are facilitating in going overseas. They have not replied.

Why can't I be intentionally clever?

when you are in a COLLEGE TOWN, you should expect ANYBODY to walk in. Colleges serve a variety of people.

When you are in a college town famous for being liberal, the above provision must be doubled. Even if you, as a buisness owner, have beliefs that are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, you should know your damned audience.

Simply put, there is NO excuse for this behavior in a town like berekely. Not that it should be excused in Mississippi either, but damned well NOT in Berekely.

And I can't comment with 2 thumbs up because I don't have a facebook account. But this post speaks the HOME TRUTH of the entire situation:

I believe the conversation about racism in Elmwood needs to include a conversation about HOMELESSNESS in Elmwood...the scores of homeless people living in Berkeley commercial doorways right now, their UNMET NEEDS, for an income, including funds for food & RENT. We need to talk about the lack of affordable housing for homeless people HERE, and for millions of Americans. And how racism is tied into/involved in OUR COUNTRY NOT MEETING THAT NEED. By necessity homeless people (whom in Elmwood have diverse racial & other characteristics) use bathrooms at local cafes and panhandle for food. Here in Berkeley there is a giant gap between the haves and have nots, and cafe workers are fairly rattled dealing with panhandlers at their cafes every day and what they see as a need to protect their customers from being approached while they eat. We need to talk about THAT. Homelessness and the desperation of homeless people for MONEY they arent able to get through a social services safety net...is a HUGE ISSUE. I think the customer in Elmwood mistaken for a homeless person panhandling ALSO points out the TENSION that POVERTY IS CREATING BETWEEN THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS in our community and the people in between. If we had a social services safety net, including affordable housing and easy access to FOOD we would not be talking about a young Afr Amer person eating at a cafe being mistaken for a panhandler. WHY DO WE HAVE PANHANDLERS??? The situation where we have thousands of people in the US needing to panhandle to survive is INSANE. We have the resources to end all poverty.

I worked for 15 years for the Parks Dept of Berkeley, largely in that area.

No they have not changed much at all. You see in my estimation there are lots of folks here including business owners who in their way, have no concept of others especially if they look different from them.

I retied in 2000 and usually had a local citizen pretty much every day, walk up and say that I should make those folks leave Willard Park or Ashby Place because somehow, they feel that the parks were just for them. I can't remember having someone in the "cheap seats" towards the west near Oakland play the same game as the "fou-fou" folks nearer to campus.

Sadly they are full of chain stores and materialistic predators trying to create tourist traps .

That's why the nouveau technoholyzed riche want to move here (and it's a short commute from the even more ridiculously expensine San Francisco. It's also why the people who were impoverished by the economic meltdown are easy to displace even if they have lived here for decades.

So the thoughtless hipsters have invaded and just shove people out of the way or trample over them - ripping apart community ties and even families. They are allowed to do this because policymakers stall over issues pertaining to people on fixed incomes and just look the other way while people fall through the cracks. Then "magically" they have less of a problem. Berkeley is only 8% black now - gee, how did that happen? We were very fixedly looking at that blank wall over there for the ladt 30 years...