A video of a white woman accusing an African-American man of stealing from his own car as he cleaned it outside his home in Bristol, United Kingdom, is being widely circulated on social media.
Abdi Kheyre shared video footage of the encounter on Twitter along with a caption saying that he was racially profiled by the cyclist while as he was cleaning the passenger seat.
"This morning I was in my car cleaning the passenger seat and this white lady came up to me accusing me of being a thief," he captioned the clip. "I've lived in this area in Bristol for the past 10 years. I've been parking my car here for years now and I've never seen anything like this before," he added.
'You Look Like You're Rifling Through Someone's Glove Box'
The video starts off with Kheyre saying into the camera, "This white lady thinks I'm robbing my own car because I'm black." The woman then asks him for his vehicle registration number. "You look like you're rifling through someone's glove box," she says to him as she points out to the car's open glove compartment.
"That's my flipping car. You think I'm robbing my own car because I'm black," Kheyre tells the woman before urging her to call the police. "I might do," she responds. "Everything comes down to race now, doesn't it?"
Kheyre gives the woman his registration details before asking her to leave. The cyclist then claims that there's "lots of car crime in this road", which is why she was concerned before the university student points out to her that he lives in that area.
The woman leaves but returns later to apologize to Kheyre saying, "If you live around here, we should be mates." Watch the video clip below:
Kheyre was Cleaning His Vehicle Before Annual Safety Test
In an interview with The Independent, Kheyre said he was cleaning his Ford Fiesta before its MOT Test, an annual vehicle safety test required in the U.K. for vehicle over three years old, when he pulled out the glove compartment with excessive force, causing the whole compartment to come off and expose the fuse box area.
He noted that while several passers-by wished him a good morning and one of them had a conversation with him about the weather, the woman stopped to ask him what his registration number was.
Kheyre said he was encouraged to put the footage online by concerned friends and decided to speak out in an attempt to prevent it from happening again. He added that he had a younger sister who was learning to drive, who he feared may not have stood up for herself in the same way.
"So I'm putting this online and talking about it so that this woman doesn't do this to my siblings or someone else," he said. "In Bristol, when I was younger I faced racism, but not in the area that we live in. My area is diverse, we have so many different colours and races in that area, and we all thought we were safe in this area, but apparently we're not."
