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other people being turned away at<br />
the door,” he says. Of course, quotas<br />
are strenuously denied by club<br />
owners and managers – so do they<br />
really exist? Georgina*, a former door<br />
girl at some of London’s premier<br />
clubs, says that while no specific<br />
numbers were ever mentioned in the<br />
places she worked, she was told the<br />
clubs had a specific ‘look’. “I would<br />
get told, ‘Keep the number of Asians<br />
down, keep the number of blacks<br />
down,’” she tells me. “Then the club<br />
would reach a certain point and it<br />
would be, ‘That’s it, no more black<br />
people,’ so I’d have to turn people<br />
away. My boss would always be<br />
watching the queue on CCTV and<br />
would be chatting away in my ear,<br />
saying, ‘That group of girls aren’t<br />
allowed in, they’re too ugly. That<br />
group of men is too black.’ And I had<br />
to listen – otherwise I’d lose my job.”<br />
Dave,* who has worked as a bouncer<br />
for 25 years across the country, confirms<br />
this. “I have been in situations where<br />
we’re being told by the managers not<br />
to let too many black people in,” he<br />
says. “It’s not just the upmarket clubs<br />
– pubs and student places operate like<br />
this too. It’s rarely the bouncers who<br />
are racist, it’s almost always the<br />
owners. They have stupid ideas of<br />
what certain races will behave like.”<br />
“With black men it’s violence,” adds<br />
Georgina, when quizzed. “With Asian<br />
people it’s because they think they<br />
won’t spend, while with black<br />
women it’s because they think that<br />
men won’t want to buy them drinks.<br />
You could let a totally averagelooking<br />
blonde in and it would be<br />
fine, but in order to let a dark-skinned<br />
woman in, she’d have to be out-ofthis-world<br />
stunning.”<br />
It’s here that racism meets misogyny.<br />
Are you the kind of woman men want<br />
to spend money on? In today’s<br />
society, where all of last year’s FHM<br />
top 10 sexiest women in the world are<br />
white (and there are just seven out of<br />
the 100 who are black or mixed-race),<br />
dark-skinned women just don’t seem<br />
Ade – all dressed<br />
up and nowhere to go<br />
to fit into the ideal. “At the end of the<br />
night, I would pay the promoters on<br />
the calibre of girl they brought into<br />
the club,” explains Georgina. “It would<br />
be £10 for a stunning girl, £5 for an<br />
average girl, and for those who weren’t<br />
attractive, they wouldn’t be paid. For<br />
my managers the perfect club was<br />
60% rich men, 40% beautiful women<br />
– and in their minds,<br />
beautiful meant slim, tall<br />
and white. Or mixedrace.<br />
A mixed-race girl<br />
was seen as worth more<br />
than a beautiful blonde.”<br />
This policy of literally<br />
putting prices on<br />
women’s heads was<br />
playing out at Dstrkt the<br />
night that Lin Mei and<br />
her group were being<br />
“To let a darkskinned<br />
woman<br />
in, she’d have<br />
to be stunning”<br />
turned away from the door. Brooke<br />
Norton, 19, who used to promote for<br />
the club, had brought along a group<br />
of black friends. “Usually, when there<br />
were people on my guest list, they<br />
wouldn’t have to pay,” she explains.<br />
“But on this occasion, we arrived and<br />
they had to pay £10. Once inside, my<br />
manager pulled me aside and said,<br />
‘They’re not going to<br />
pay you for the girls<br />
you’ve brought,’ and<br />
then later I was told not<br />
to bring ‘so many black<br />
girls next time”.” The next<br />
morning, Brooke posted<br />
an Instagram video of<br />
her experiences, and quit<br />
promoting for the club.<br />
So has Dstrkt’s policy<br />
changed? It’s been<br />
120 · COSMOPOLITAN
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