A white woman was fired from her job after appearing in a viral video where she prevented a black man from entering the luxury apartment block he lives in, her employer has confirmed.
D'Arreion Toles uploaded the video to Facebook on Saturday morning. It showed a woman blocking the entrance to Toles's apartment building in downtown St Louis, Missouri. When he eventually made it past her, she then followed him all the way up to his apartment and watched him open the door. The woman then suggested she only wanted to "introduce [herself] as a neighbor." Toles said that, half an hour later, police arrived at his door.
In Toles' Facebook post—which has been shared more than 123,000 times—he wrote: "To be a black man in America, & come home… never really thought this would happen to me, but it did!" The video footage has been watched more than 2 million times.
After the post went viral, the woman was identified as an employee of property-management company Tribeca Luxury Apartments. In a statement pinned to their website's homepage, Tribeca called the video "disturbing" and said she had been fired.
"The Tribeca-STL family is a minority-owned company that consists of employees and residents from many racial backgrounds," the statement said. "We are proud of this fact and do not and never will stand for racism or racial profiling at our company."
The company also confirmed that the apartment block was not one they were responsible for and the woman was not working in any professional capacity during the confrontation.
Toles told KMOV that he was "blown away" and "shocked" by the incident, but says he refuses to be angry at the woman.
"I am not mad at her. I am not upset with her. I am not going to go after her legally or anything like that. I wish her the best," he said. "I would still have a conversation with her."
In a later interview with Real Stl News, Toles said: "We all know what the issue is, the issue doesn't even have to be stated. What needs to be the focus is the resolution."
The incident drew comparisons with another viral incident in Oakland, California, in April earlier this year, where a white woman called the police on a black family that was having a barbeque in a park. The police arrived and no one was arrested.
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