When a white woman told me to keep my dog off her lawn while allowing others to frolic about, I thought maybe she just didn’t like Blue Heelers. When a white woman watched my wife and I like a hawk as if we were about to steal her car, I thought maybe she was just super protective of her 2016 Prius. But when my white neighbor called me a “DEI Hire” before summoning city inspectors to my premises, I could no longer suspend judgment: Boulder has a race problem.

As a scholar of race, I’m well aware of the country’s gradual transition away from explicit racial attacks. In 1955, when Carolyn Bryant summoned a lynch mob to reinforce the rules of racial etiquette, she was infused with racial animus toward 14-year-old Emmett Till. In 2020, when Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper in Central Park, claiming that the bird watcher was “threatening her,” or in 2018, when Alison Ethel called the cops on 8-year-old Jordan Rodgers for “selling water without a permit,” their racial animus was less blatant. While only Amy and Alison’s therapists may know the content of their psyche, their joint commitment to using state power to police Black people was on clear display.

Since Derek Chauvin’s brutal murder of George Floyd — as well as the senseless killings of Breonna Taylor, Ta’Kiya Young and Sonya Massey, among others — many white liberals have proudly declared themselves to be anti-racist. After all, they reasoned, they certainly wouldn’t have shot an unarmed and innocent black person; they don’t even own a gun! Yet while Boulder’s million-dollar homes boast placards stating that “Black Lives Matter,” many of their inhabitants unapologetically replicate systems of racial oppression. Let’s take the white woman who polices people of color near her 2016 Prius. Is she racist? If she doesn’t get uncomfortable when white people are close to her Prius, that’s certainly evidence of some sort of bias. Even if the woman is biased, we might still ask, what’s the harm? If my wife and I weren’t about to steal her car, what do we have to complain about?

If you find yourself comforted by this line of reasoning, I ask you to re-examine the stories cited above. If a Black birdwatcher isn’t threatening a woman, and if a Black 8-year-old selling water isn’t violating city code, do you think they still have the right to be upset about having the cops called on them?

To me, and for me, what makes such actions so grossly unjust is that surveillance and state violence are imposed on these individuals because of their race. If white people feel justified to police Black and brown people because they are not white, this is both racist in itself and feeds state-sanctioned racism. According to this sick logic, legal notions of “probable cause” and “reasonable suspicion” are rendered redundant, as Black and brown people’s very existence provides white people with enough reason to call the cavalry.

(Of course, I would be remiss in saying that the problem with calling the police on people because they are not white is simply a problem because it violates some abstract code of racial equality. In practice, it is also a problem because it can bring unjustified and unnecessary violence upon Black and brown bodies. But that’s a topic for another day.)

To close, I should say a couple of words about the most explicit racial insult I’ve received in my six months (!) of living in Boulder: my neighbor’s claim that I only got my job because I am a person of color (i.e. a “DEI candidate”). Just as white people have the power to enact state violence on our communities because we are not white, they have the power to question our qualifications because we are not white. With DEI programs rapidly being scuttled and defunded, the results may end up being exactly what racist individuals in Boulder have wanted all along, even if they were too squeamish to admit it: fewer non-white people walking on “their” sidewalks, standing near “their” cars, and living in “their” communities.

Vishnu Sridharan is an assistant professor of philosophy at CU Boulder. Sridharan lives in Boulder.