Michael Hayes stands at one of the properties he's working on rehabilitating in Memphis. Photo / Washington Post
Sitting in his car outside a boarded-up house on a recent Saturday morning, Michael Hayes went through the mental checklist of things he does to make sure suspicious people know he is an enterprising young real estate investor, not a burglar or a drug addict.
He readied his business cards. He grabbed a sign with his business website and phone number to plant in the front yard of the brick house on Douglass Avenue.
He queued up the contract that the homeowner signed allowing Hayes to go inside and take pictures for potential investors. He even had the owner on the phone as he worked one of the boards loose. And, as always, he exhibited a polite and respectful demeanour to anyone he met.
None of it was enough.
Before that afternoon was over, Hayes - a 31-year-old father, former teacher and an entrepreneur with a growing portfolio of rehabbed homes for sale - would have to justify his presence to a screaming neighbour and the police officers summoned to the scene.
He had committed no crime, and the police did not arrest him. But many of the millions of people who saw the video he recorded of the conflict say his transgression wasn't what he did, but who he is: He was real estate investing while black.
"You know why the lady called the police on me," he said, looking directly into the camera. "I don't look threatening."
In recent weeks, a host of viral videos have shown black Americans engaged in innocuous activities that led to emergency calls.
On May 12, a group was questioned by a state trooper while picking up litter on a Pennsylvania highway. Four days earlier, a Yale University student was interrogated by police after her dorm neighbour called the police because she was napping in a common area. And a week before that, a neighbour reported a burglary in progress as a group of black women left their Airbnb in Rialto, California.
The incidents have given rise to the hashtag #livingwhileblack and often end with a black person being interrogated by police or being carted off in handcuffs. In the worst cases, the incidents have escalated to body slams or even gunshots.
Starbucks has planned to shut down 8000 US stores to engage employees in discussions about racial bias after a manager at a Philadelphia Starbucks last month called police on two black men who were waiting for a friend before ordering. A viral video shot by another customer showed police removing the men in handcuffs.
Last week, NAACP President Derrick Johnson accused US President Donald Trump of encouraging the trend, saying there is "a direct relationship between the racist language and policies emerging from the White House and the growing number of hate crimes and blatant attacks on the humanity of black people."
While cellphone videos have raised the profile of such incidents, they're not a new phenomenon: In 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested after a neighbour saw him attempting to enter his own home when he was locked out.
President Barack Obama, who would later hold what some called "a beer summit" with Gates and the arresting officer, said he didn't know whether race played a role in the incident. But, he added, "There's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."
When they have spoken publicly, the emergency callers and responding police departments typically have denied that their suspicion was racially motivated.
Tiffiany Albert said race played no role in her decision to confront Hayes, the black real estate investor. Albert, who identifies as Spanish and has a black boyfriend, said her reaction was reasonable, given crime in the neighbourhood.
Phillip Goff, president of the Centre for Policing Equity, a nonprofit that promotes police transparency and accountability, said that many people see the police as more than just instruments for enforcing the law. They use them as enforcers of unwritten social rules, which can be steeped in discriminatory thinking.
"The issue is that, for many folks, law enforcement has been seen as their own racism valet," Goff said.
"We talk about not just crime, we talk about disorder - anything that makes folks feel uncomfortable or says that the social norms that we've all agreed to are being violated," he said. "And the problem is that black skin frequently violates the social order."