A white woman has been fired from her job after being caught on video harassing a Black couple at a dog park in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn on Saturday night, telling them to “Stay in your hood.”
“She’s like, ‘You’re not from around here. Go back to your hood. Stay in your hood. Stay in your hood,’” Frederick Joseph told CBS2’s Thalia Perez. “So I’m like, ‘Stay in my hood?’ Right, like? ‘You’re being racist right now,’ and she’s like, ‘I’m not being racist.’”
That part of the confrontation wasn’t captioned on the video Joseph posted to his Twitter account. Joseph, who was a 2018 The Root 100 honoree, said the confrontation began when he says the woman confused his dog with another dog that was barking loudly.
“I tried to explain, like, ‘I think you have the wrong dog,’ and then she just starts, like, going completely out of left field,” Joseph said to CBS2 New York. “At that point, I’m like, look, what you’re doing is deeply, deeply offensive, deeply racist, and I want to get this on camera because I don’t want there to be any misconceptions about what took place here.”
“She was saying a lot of things, and that’s when, like, finally, like, ‘You guys need to take your dog out of here. You people shouldn’t even be here,’” Joseph’s fiancee, Porsche Landon, said.
Steve Tracy was at the park with his dog at the very moment the white woman made the racist comments.
“As those words were coming out and things started to unfold, it was pretty obvious to me, like, this is…this is not OK,” Tracy said to the news outlet. When CBS2 went to the woman’s door for comment, she had nothing to say.
Well, her boss had a few words.
Derek Anderson, the CEO of Bevy, believed to be the woman’s employer, offered an apology to the couple and said on Twitter, “Yesterday an employee engaged in behavior contrary to our values and has been terminated.”
Joseph responded to her firing by telling his followers it serves as a reminder for folks to be accountable for their actions.
“While it’s unfortunate that she had to lose her job, I do think this brings up an important conversation about accountability, especially in a country where Black and brown people, marginalized people as a whole, have seen so little of it,” he said.
Joseph is the author of a book called The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person.
But, as one of our 2018 Young Futurists found out earlier this year, trying to educate white people on how to be better white people can turn on you and be a pain. Taylor Richardson organized a virtual chat with Joseph at the Jacksonville Public Library and white people, of course, showed their asses.