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Tom Austin

White-splaining pioneer Tom Austin goes full Karen at Uptown ... This site uses cookies. By using this site, you agree to our: , and .

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Image via Getty/Grant Smith/Construction Photography/AvalonUPDATED 5/28, 10:20 p.m. ET: Tom Austin lost his office lease after the incident at a shared office space went viral, .

“Should have handled it differently,” Austin told the outlet via e-mail. “Not my job to have done anything.”

Stuart Ackerberg, CEO of Ackerberg Group, which owns the building, spoke to Austin, and told him that he could've handled the encounter differently. “I shared with him that I did not think it was handled well and there are other ways to go about this,” Ackerberg said.

And while original reports suggested that the incident took place at a WeWork, the company has since clarified that it did not.

See original story below.

A venture capitialist in is of racially profiling a group of black men at a WeWork office space, after video of the incident began circulating online on Wednesday. A man, who has since been identifed as Tom Austin, can be seen asking the men if they are also tenants of the building, which has a shared private gym space the men had previously used. When the men don't tell him what floor their rented office space is on, which they have rented for over a year, Austin calls the police.

"As we were working out this man approached and immediately asked us who we were and if 'WE BELONG' in this building," the three men's company, Top Figure, wrote on Instagram alongside videos of the situation. "Granted in order to enter the building you NEED a key card to enter EVERY part of the building which EACH of our team members individually have. We all pay rent here and this man demanded that we show him our key cards or he will call the cops on us. We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day to day basis and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation," they explained further.

This isn't the first time Tom Austin has been called out for racist behavior, as he previously made news for a similar reason back in 2017.

reported that Austin, who labels himself the CEO and managing partner of venture capital and private equity firm F2 Group, rallied to not change the name of Lake Calhoun, which was named after noted slave owner John C. Calhoun. It was later renamed Bde Maka Ska, in honor of the region's Native American history. "American Indian activists seem to have hijacked the discussion," Austin said at the time. "What is the heroism or accomplishment that we are recognizing in order to justify renaming the lake to Bde Maka Ska?" He also previously suggested that the "white establishment" needn't "atone" for anything.

Austin , saying that he "f*cked up," and that he should have handled the situation "differently."

"They got in my face in a very threatening manner and I threatened back to call [building] security," he added. "I would have done this regardless of race. So this is bullshit."

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[http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6685975&cv=2.0&cj=1][https://ct.pinterest.com/v3/?tid=2615071740179&pd[em]=<hashed_email_address>&noscript=1][https://px.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=1232362&fmt=gif] Style Close Minneapolis Man Accused of Racially Profiling Black Entrepreneurs ... The viral video of venture capitalist Tom Austin comes after a similar clip in Minneapolis and another from New York. Fill 2 Copy 11 Created with Sketch. Thursday 28 May 2020 19:19, UK

Man calls 911 on black men using gym A white businessman has had his office lease terminated after a viral video showed him calling the police on a group of black entrepreneurs who he claimed had no right to be in his gym.

Social media startup Team Top Figure shared a video of their interaction with venture capitalist Tom Austin in their office building gym in on Tuesday night.

The clip, which has had more than 50,000 likes on Instagram, shows him taking pictures of the men and accusing them of not being tenants of the building in .

Despite the men saying "we pay rent", Mr Austin continues to ask "what office are you in?" before warning: "I'm calling 911 now."

In another video of Mr Austin on the phone to police, the entrepreneurs tell viewers: "As you guys can see, we're dealing with racism here."

Advertisement In the caption for the video, they wrote: "We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day to day basis and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation."

The building's owner Stuart Ackerberg, CEO of the Ackerberg Group, has since terminated Mr Austin's lease.

More from Minneapolis He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he was "heartbroken" and "alarmed" at what he saw in video.

Mr Austin apologised, telling the paper: "I said, 'I'm sorry you thought I was being racist, but I was not. If you were a bunch of women, I would have done the same thing.'"

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It comes after a white woman was sacked from her job with a private investment firm after a video of her threatening to call the police on a black man in 's Central Park went viral.

was let go by Franklin Templeton after she was accused of racism over the row, which started after Christian Cooper asked her to put her dog on a leash. The pair are not related.

Another video shared widely online this week showed a white police officer kneeling on an unarmed black man's neck shortly before he died in Minneaopolis.

was heard saying he could not breathe and was pronounced dead shortly after. His death has sparked large protests and four of the officers involved in his arrest have been sacked.

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Accept Settings Dismiss Tom-Austin-black-enterprise - Black Enterprise Tom Austin sure picked an interesting night to threaten black men with a call to 911. Instagram

Time was, Tom Austin fought for the dignity of things that really mattered. Like the lake he lived near.

Austin is the south Minneapolis venture capitalist who spent years battling the renaming of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska. At one point he , door-to-door. Another time he took out an ad to for a legal case, one the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Austin is also the author of the following sentences, which he in Minnesota's paper of record:

> With the exception of one person, they were angry at the "white establishment" and felt that we Minnesotans need to atone for history's wrongdoings. Ironically, none of them was able to provide specifics of what exactly we needed to atone for, other than "Calhoun was racist and we stole all of this land from the Indians." Austin's quest to save the name Lake Calhoun ended, seemingly once and for all, with a 5-2 loss in the state's high court earlier this month.

For most men, one ill-fated quixotic battle on behalf of the is enough excitement for one decade. Tom Austin is not most men.

As of Tuesday evening, Austin is back in the spotlight, once again of his own volition, and again stubbornly crusading for the white -- sorry, for the right -- to enjoy his version of south Minneapolis precisely as he imagined it.

The scene was captured on the Instagram account of something called , a small business whose entrepreneurs office out of a WeWork in one of the MoZaic buildings in Uptown. Evidently, the Top Figure guys were making use of a shared gym space Tuesday evening when they were confronted by Captain Lake Calhoun himself, Tom Austin, there to uphold the integrity of the weight room and verify these men belonged there.

(Do we have to say it?)

They're black.

"I'm Tom Austin," proclaims the Patron Saint of Very Small South Minneapolis Causes. "I'm a tenant in the building. Are you?"

(They are.)

"What office are you in?" asks Austin, who is told not to worry about it, apparently by someone who doesn't know worrying about things that involve brown people but do not actually affect Tom Austin is what Tom Austin does best.

"I'm calling 911 then," he says.

It might occur to you that Austin was making this threat the day after a successful white woman in New York City was caught attempting to sicc the cops on a black man who'd done nothing illegal -- and had since .

Or, more immediately, that Austin was threatening to call Minneapolis police , accused of possessing a bad $20 bill, while three others helped. Or that, at that very moment, the streets some 20 blocks from where they stood were .

Then again, timing has never been Tom Austin's strong suit. (This is a guy who waited 150 years after the Civil War to pledge allegiance to John C. Calhoun.) He did not carry out his warning about calling the cops, instead phoning some other authority to inform them of a "whole bunch of people who don't appear to be part of the..."-- Austin trails off, and his videographer talks over him, asking: "Y'all see this racism here?"

If you do, reader, Tom Austin still doesn't. City Pages tried contacting Austin, but he didn't get back to us. (Tom, what gives? Was it something we wrote? Was it a series of things we wrote?) But he did , writing that "several of these guys were trespassing and using a gym that was authorized only for building tenants."

Austin added: "Seems like nobody cares about the complete truth," a point he immediately proved, by lying. "They got in my face in a very threatening manner and I threatened back to call building security."

Gee, it sure seems like Tom is the person in this situation who got in someone's face?

"I would have done this regardless of race," Austin wrote. "So this is bullshit."

A second email to BMTN starts with the first Tom Austin line City Pages quotes approvingly: "Yes, I fucked up." Austin continues:

> "I noticed that one of the tenants seemed to have brought 4 friends and I complained to them that this isn’t right and it's unfair to the tenants who pay. One guy was letting his other 4 friends in and out of the building with his FOB. Nobody else had a FOB. When I said something, they got in my face in a very threatening manner accusing me of racial profiling. I said it wasn't racial profiling and was all about suspicious activity/behavior." Pretty telling, isn't it? The "threat" Tom is exposed to is being accused of racism. The threat posed to the black men is the cops -- hardly an idle one, on a night like last night in a place like this.

Guess it's nice to know Austin's hitting the gym. He'll need to stay limber if he absolutely insists on putting his foot in his mouth in public this often.

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