Hotel staff can silently exclude guests of color by refusing to log their name

Evidence

Since the receptionist does not look as though he is going to make a move to process my name in the computer, I ask for the reservation form, add my name, commenting “now you have the correct spelling to put into your computer.” I am expecting a call at 7 p.m. that evening from a colleague at the University of Cape Town concerning the exact arrangements for a talk I have agreed to give. The expected call does not come through. Upon return from the restaurant, later that evening, we check at the reception whether there has been a call at all, unwilling to believe that my colleague has forgotten about me. Our skepticism appears to have ground: the receptionist who had registered us had bluntly refused to file my name into the computer. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1488

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the hotel scene in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and to Cold War-era name-erasure motifs — the erasure of a person through refusal to register them.
• QUESTION: Could the manager’s office door appearing at that moment have been staged? The sequence reads almost too perfectly as a scripted management response.