This is no “Karen” story.
This isn’t a story about an entitled white woman calling the police on Black people for simply existing. This is a story about a Black family calling the police on a white woman who pulled a gun on them in a Detroit, Mich., parking lot Wednesday...for doing little more than simply existing. This is about white racism coming out of nowhere and putting Black lives in danger.
The Washington Post reports that Takelia Hill and her three daughters were on a trip to Chipotle when the altercation with the unidentified white woman began. Hill’s 15-year-old daughter, Makayla Green, was walking towards the restaurant when the woman who was walking in the opposite direction bumped into her. This lead to a heated exchange in which the white woman started cursing at a child and Makayla called her “ignorant and racist.”
From the Post:
When the woman bumped into Makayla, the teenager asked her for an apology. Instead, the woman began yelling expletives.
“I had moved out of the way so she can walk out,” Makayla told the Detroit News. “She bumped me and I said, ‘Excuse you.’ And then she started cussing me out, and saying things like I was invading her personal space.”
Scared of what might happen next, the teenager called her mother over. The confrontation escalated and a man got out of a gray minivan and pulled the woman inside, the News reported.
“You cannot just walk around calling white people racist,” the woman said through the car’s passenger-side window. “White people aren’t racist. … I care about you and I’m sorry if you had an incident that has made someone make you feel like that. No one is racist.”
What happens next would lead any Black person who has seen this kind of situation before to side-eye any claims that this woman isn’t, in fact, racist as hell.
According to the Post, Hill was afraid the woman’s minivan was going to hit them while backing out of a parking spot so she hit the back window of the car with her hand to alert the driver. That’s when the white woman got out, pointed a gun at them and shouted at them to “Get away!”
Hill can be heard in the video calling for one of her daughters to call the police.
“She’s got the gun on me,” Hill shouted. “She was about to hit me with the car. This is crazy! Trump making it real comfortable.”
According to Detroit News, a police officer arrived at the scene with his weapon drawn and handcuffed the white woman who, at that point, was already on her hands and knees on the ground near her car. It’s unclear whether she was charged with anything, but a family member, who was not there during the incident, said on Twitter that she was arrested but then let go.
Hill wrote in a Facebook post regarding the incident, “So this is America....I’ve never in my life had a gun pulled out on me let alone two and while I had my three daughters I’ve never felt so helpless in my life I’m so shaken up.”