DISTURBING

Artist Kahlil Robert Irving Says He Was Racially Profiled by NYC Hotel Staff

“It was highly traumatic to be confronted by two older white men who barged into my hotel room unannounced,” Kahlil Robert Irving writes.

On Sept. 19, artist Kahlil Robert Irving filed a racial discrimination complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights against Manhattan’s High Line Hotel, accusing workers there of trespassing and verbal abuse, Hyperallergic reports. According to Irving’s complaint, on the morning of Jan. 22, he was asleep in his hotel room when a manager came in and asked if Irving was okay, as his door was supposedly slightly ajar. Soon afterward, the artist says, the manager and another person re-entered the room. The manager allegedly screamed that the artist was not supposed to be there and accused him of being homeless while his partner blocked the door. “As a twenty-nine year old Black man, it was highly traumatic to be confronted by two older white men who barged into my hotel room unannounced while I was sleeping, screaming at me and saying that I needed to leave immediately and that the police were being called,” Irving writes in his complaint. “Can one seriously believe that this incident would have taken place and would have unfolded in such an aggressive and malicious manner, for any other reason, and absent hostile, racial stereotyping?” Irving, who is now seeking legal action after the hotel apparently shrugged off the episode as a “serious misunderstanding,” had an exhibition on view at MoMA at the time the alleged verbal assault took place.