An incident of apparent racial discrimination unfolded inside a coffee shop named Caffe Nero located in the New England area. Black journalist Phillip Martin was denied service inside the cafe by a female barista. He was mistaken for someone who had urinated on the premises of the shop and behaved rudely toward the staff. The accusation took the 71-year-old aback as he sat down in the cafe to meet a fellow journalist.
According to an Atlanta Black Star report, the journalist visited Caffe Nero at 5 p.m. on Nov. 20. He was supposed to meet a freelance journalist named Naomi Kooker. When he walked toward the counter and ordered a cup of tea, the staff clearly told him that they weren’t going to serve him. More shockingly, one of the staff members called up the police, and in response, he too pulled out his phone to call the cops. Elaborating on the situation, Martin spoke to Boston.com and said, “When someone calls the police, it’s best also to have some role in that.”
Since he knew he was innocent, Martin confronted the staff by saying, “Are you mistaking me for someone else?” But the woman was adamant in her accusation, and even claimed that the obscene act was recorded on camera. The barista had said, “No, it’s you. We have you on videotape.” When cops from Cambridge arrived, they deduced that there was a significant misunderstanding at the scene.
“I looked at the photo, and I told them, ‘He looks nothing like me,’” Martin recalled. He said the picture showed a much younger light-skinned Black man with a scruffy beard.” I would’ve definitely had a much more stronger reaction to this than he did. 😒 https://t.co/d7JHEN3ve9
— The REAL Dr. Dré (@DrDre1914) November 29, 2025
Police assured the staff of the cafe that Phillip Martin was not the man they were on the lookout for. A spokesperson from the cafe admitted the mistake by calling it a case of a genuine mistake due to the similarity of looks. The senior journalist, however, had a different opinion, since the accused man is younger than him and is lighter-skinned. He said, “I looked at the photo, and I told them, ‘He looks nothing like me. This was not a doppelgänger in the least.”
The Caffe Nero spokesperson reiterated that “this was a genuine case of mistaken identity due to the close similarity of height, build, and style of beard and glasses with a customer who had been responsible for significant anti-social behavior previously.”
They further defended the female staff’s rude behavior as being fueled by a prior incident of trauma. They added, “While it is not acceptable to confuse any customer with another, the prior incident was traumatic for the barista involved, and it triggered her response.”
For Phillip Martin, such racism operating under the guise of mistaken identity is nothing new. As a Black man, he’s spent a considerable time in his 15-year-long career writing about Black people getting falsely accused. In the case of the incident inside the cafe, Martin chose to remain in the cafe with his head held high.
In an interview with the Boston Globe, he said, “That’s the type of thing that occurred in my youth more than once, and it obviously had nothing to do with me. In the world of race and discrimination, ‘someone who looks like you’ is pervasive. These things are predicated on stereotypes and are their logical conclusions. I did not want anyone to have the satisfaction of having kicked me out. We didn’t buy anything after that, but we did stay because the notion of leaving, to me, would have been a victory for that type of prejudice.”
Ever since the incident, the retired journalist has filed multiple complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission. He underlined the frequent issue of being told that Black people always ‘look like someone else’. Martin stated, “They cannot make assumptions based on what the person appears to look like, because that is subject to the most vile stereotype when those things happen.”
