*Corey Lewis recorded the encounter he had with a white woman stopped him outside a Walmart in Cobb County, Georgia because she assumed he kidnapped the two white children who were accompanying him — she even followed them home.
As it turns out, Lewis was babysitting the kids — Addison, 10, and Nicholas, 6 — and he accuses the woman of following and harassing him for nearly an hour on Sunday afternoon.
He first noticed her staring at him as he returned to his car after taking the kids to Subway. She then pulled up alongside them to ask if the siblings were OK.
“Why wouldn’t they be OK?” Lewis said he responded, but his answer didn’t satisfy the seemingly concerned woman.
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“It’s 2018 and this is what I have to deal with. I can’t go out with two kids who don’t look like me without it being weird,” Corey Lewis said.https://t.co/XTXSVqTqZG
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 10, 2018
Lewis said after driving off, she then returned and asked to speak to the eldest child, Addison. When he refused, he says “The lady got upset and she said, ‘OK, I’m going to take your license plate number.’”
The irate woman then followed as he drove home, where he was met by police.
Lewis recorded parts of what happened in a series of Facebook Lives, which quickly went viral.
“It never occurred to me that someone would see us and decide to take such judgment that she took,” said Lewis, who runs a local community group. “In 2018, prejudiced people exist. We are still being judged, we are still being discriminated against,” he said.
The woman has not been identified and the incident has been dubbed #BabysittingWhileBlack.
The parents said they struggled to make sense of what had happened.
“I said are you telling me that because a woman saw a young African-American male with two white kids that they were pulled over by the police?,” the children’s mother, Dana Mango, recalled asking a police officer.
“He was apologetic and said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry that appears to be what happened,’” she recalled.
Mango doesn’t believe the woman was truly concerned for her kids.
“It doesn’t make sense in light of what happened. They weren’t crying, they weren’t distressed,” she said. “There was only one thing that she saw that was out of place and that was kids of a different race than the person they were with,” she added. “That’s not a concern for the kids. That’s racial profiling.”
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