"What you said is completely inappropriate. You can get out," he said. "Now."
"You guys are racist."
The guy off-camera called the driver a "n****r lover."
I heard the whole thing on my favorite progressive radio channel. With commentary. Bravo!
What the woman said was indeed inappropriate, but I could see most people shrugging it off and just going on with business as usual. What is remarkable is the driver's sensitivity to that ugliness and his willingness to call it out. And then, sealing the deal, you can hear the guy off camera call the driver a "n****r lover." I think the last time I heard anyone utter that phrase I was in junior high, nearly 50 years ago. Thanks to assholes like the Done Cheato, what was once on the fringe has now become mainstream. On his cable TV show, Fox News' Tucker Carlson has spoken of the mythical "great replacement" of white people by people of color over 400 times. You can draw a straight line from Trump and Fox News to the recent massacre of black folks in Buffalo. Trump, Carlson, and his boss, Rupert Murdoch, all have blood on their hands.
Exactly. When I moved to rural Wenatchee, WA in 1984, I felt shocked.
"I never laugh at racist jokes," I said firmly and loudly. Awkward silence. "I was just kidding," people replied lamely.
People stopped telling racist jokes around me. Good.
These were lifelong Wenatchee residents. I couldn't relate to them. Some bragged they had never been to Seattle. They thought Wenatchee was the center of the universe.
Instead I made friends with progressive, well educated people like me who moved here from another state.