A black Google employee has claimed he was racially profiled and escorted from the tech giant's sprawling California campus because security guards did not believe the recent Harvard graduate worked there.
Angel Onuoha, an associate product manager who graduated from the Ivy League school with a 3.8 average last spring, was held for 30 minutes by security guards at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, he said.
Google blamed the incident on a snafu with Onuoha's security badge - and rejected any claims of bias - saying administrative issues prevented guards from being able to verify the pass.
On September 20, Onuohoa shared his experience in a tweet that has since become viral and earned more than 90,000 likes and nearly 14,000 retweets.
'Riding my bike around Google's campus and somebody called security on me because they didn't believe I was an employee. Had to get escorted by two security guards to verify my ID badge,' said Onuoha, who was hired by Google last month.
Angel Onuoha, an associate product manager for Google, says he was held for 30 minutes by security guards in a case of racial profiling
Onuoha shared his experience on Twitter that has been shared nearly 14,000 times
Onuoha was an accomplished student at Harvard, graduated with a 3.8 GPA last spring
After sparking questions from indignant users on Twitter, Onuoha returned to the platform to further explain what happened.
'They ended up taking my ID badge away from me later that day and I was told to call security if I had a problem with it. And that was after holding me up for 30 minutes causing me to miss my bus ride home,' Onuoha said.
Google told Forbes that the company had reached out to Onuoha and were actively investigating the circumstances around the incident.
'More broadly, one step we've taken recently to decrease badging incidents is to make clear that employees should leave investigating these kinds of access concerns
