The tide of wypipo terribleness keeps on flowing (will it ever ebb?). This time, a hotel employee in Virginia earned himself a straight shot to the unemployment line for showing his whitest ass in a dispute with an African-American customer in early May.
A clerk at the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson in Newport News, Va., cursed a black man out when he asked for another room for his mother, and called him a fucking monkey, just to add insult to injury.
According to USA Today, the incident was captured on video and then shared on Facebook, and shortly thereafter, the general manager of the hotel issued an apology and promised sensitivity training.
The videotaped confrontation begins in the middle of the argument, in which an African-American man, identified as Irby Fogleman, can be heard saying, “Say it again.”
Fogleman was at the hotel for a family gathering that included his mother, who was visiting from West Virginia for Fogleman’s son’s 2nd birthday the following day, the Washington Post reports. His mother’s room smelled of smoke, so he went down to lodge a complaint after his girlfriend was told that there were no other rooms available. Fogleman’s mother had never smoked and didn’t want to expose small children in the family to the noxious fumes.
The conversation got heated, and the unidentified employee confronted Fogelman and yelled, “Please get off of my property.”
[You are just an employee, son. I know white men think they are entitled to every.single.thing, but alas, the hotel is not your property, mkay?]
The employee also slammed a door, called Fogelman “rude” and, of course, objected to being recorded while spewing his venom on a customer, even though he worked in customer service. After ordering Fogelman and his family to leave the hotel, this man then turned and muttered, “[Expletive] monkey.”
Fogelman repeats the racial slur and adds, “Oh, so you’re racist?” he asks the clerk. “So that’s why you don’t like me, ’cause I’m black?”
The employee denied it, but the tape doesn’t lie, mon frere führer.
Hotel General Manager Lisa Little provided a statement to a local TV station in which the business apologized for the incident and promised that all employees would undergo retraining and that the employee had been terminated:
On behalf of the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson Newport News, Va. I want to apologize for the inappropriate behavior and comments of one of our employees from an incident that occurred on Friday, May 4. We are taking this matter very seriously and effective today (May 7, 2018), the employee in the video has been terminated. As a result of this incident we will also be re-training every employee this week on our code-of-conduct policies to help ensure something like this never happens again.
Fogleman told the Post that his girlfriend is white and that he’d never experienced a racial incident up until this point in his life.
“I could not believe it. I could not believe it. It’s 2018. I have two biracial kids. Race is not a thing to me,” Fogleman said.
Well, my brother, you may not see race, but it certainly sees you.