As James Patterson reflected on the state of the writing world today, the best-selling thriller novelist with an estimated net worth of roughly $800 million lamented how one group in particular is having a hard time finding work: White men.
@nycrich10 uploaded a video to TikTok that showed an upset Karen approaching an Asian man on the subway, who had his small dog on a leash.
Anybody can see that the dog was incredibly well-behaved, and arguably had much better manners than the woman in question.
She was quick to tell the owner, “You cannot have a dog like this on the subway.”
To which he replied that he did not speak English.
She retorted “Obviously,” and although she didn’t raise her voice or cause a major scene, what was actually obvious was the subtle (or not so subtle) racism in her statement.
She was quite transparent with her real intentions, and luckily another passenger immediately came to his defense, which gave me slight hope for humanity.
Though it seems like much was said, the rest of the words were more or less lost with the background noise of the subway.
At the end of the video is a cute closeup of the small dog in question, who looks adorable and is minding his own business, unlike the Wild Karen who is still arguing with the passenger.
It looks like a few others had joined in on defending the man as well.
If you’ve ever ridden the NYC subway, you know that a small dog on a leash is the least problematic thing on there.
But some people disagree, and after watching this video, I think you’ll find it plain to see that I’m referring to the infamous Karen’s.
Yep, they’re everywhere.
@nycrich10 #fyp #karen #karensinthewild #nyc #nycsubway #dog #puppy #karensoftiktok #gaytiktok #dogsoftiktok
Let’s Take A Look At Some Of The Funniest And Most Relatable Comments:
The dog is like “yo is she talking about me? Like for reals?”
Some people just wake up and decide to be bitter.
I’m glad someone stood up for him. And his dog is so fucking cute.
The dog is all like “Is it me? Am I the drama?”
BYU has asked people who were at the Aug. 26 game for help finding the person who yelled slurs at a Black player for Duke University.
Brigham Young University said Tuesday that it was still investigating who was responsible for the racist slurs and threats that a Black player for Duke University’s women’s volleyball team said were directed at her at a match on Aug. 26.
After the match, B.Y.U. banned a person who had been sitting in its fan section from all university sporting events.
But last week the school told The Salt Lake Tribune and other local media that it had not found evidence that the unidentified spectator was responsible for the shouted slurs.
“The investigation is ongoing,” the university’s associate athletic director, Jon McBride, said Tuesday in an email.
“We are investigating fan behavior as well as the BYU. response to the behavior, reviewing video and audio as well as taking firsthand accounts from individuals who were present.”
McBride said that the person who was banned had been pointed out by Duke University, but that B.Y.U. had been “unable to find any evidence of that person using slurs in the match.”
The university has not identified the person, but said it was not a student. McBride did not respond to a question asking if the ban had been lifted.
More than 5,500 people were in the stands. The school asked people who were at the game to share videos to help with the investigation, The Tribune reported.
The Duke player’s father, Marvin Richardson, told The New York Times after the game that a slur was repeatedly yelled from the stands as his daughter, Rachel Richardson, was serving and that she feared the “raucous” crowd.
In a text message on Tuesday, he said the family was declining to comment on the investigation.
A Black fireman in western New York claims he was coerced by a supervisor to attend a racist party with disturbing images.
Jerrod Jones stated in a notice of claim filed Thursday that the racist party took place last month at a private residence in a rich area of Rochester. He and two other firemen went after their commander, Jeffrey Krywy, reportedly instructed them they should all go to the party.
Jones, a 14-year department veteran, grew apprehensive when he arrived to the residence and saw a cardboard cutout version of former President Donald Trump, because firemen aren’t permitted to attend partisan political gatherings while on duty, according to his attorney, Nate McMurray.
Jones then witnessed a parody exhibition of the Juneteenth festival, which commemorates the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, with Juneteenth flags draped over buckets of fried chicken.
A lady also reportedly impersonated a local Democratic official and did a sexually explicit dance, and photos of Democratic leaders were tied to yard posts.
Jones claimed during a press conference that the event “hurt me very deeply.” “I chose to speak up today because I have two children who may one day want to be firemen, and I don’t want them to go through what I went through.”
Jones stated that he informed his supervisors about the event and requested that he not be assigned to work under Krywy, but was rejected.
The city of Rochester and the fire department are named in the notice of claim, which is a notice of intent to sue. Jones intends to seek at least $3 million in mental anguish compensation and at least $1 million in compensatory damages. Jones is still on leave and fears reprisal, according to McMurray.
On Thursday, email and phone messages were left with the Rochester Fire Department. According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Fire Chief Felipe Hernandez Jr. termed the event “unacceptable and an affront to everyone who works with the RFD and at City Hall,” and said Krywy has been suspended.
On social media, a video showing an African-American racist woman abusing an Asian guy verbally and physically has gone viral.
A racist woman from Brooklyn who was physically occupying a parking space not only refused to do so when asked to do so, but also resorted to aggression before asking the man to “get back to China.”
First posted on Reddit, the 10-minute video was later reposted on Instagram.
Racist and entitled Karen assaults a man over parking dispute and tells him to “Go back to China “. from facepalm
The man, who appears to be Asian, is shown in the video trying to park his car as the black racist woman is seen standing on a parking space, prompting him to warn her not to block the area with her body.
Title 34 Chapter 4 Rules of the City of New York New York City Department of Transportation TRAFFIC RULES 4-08(n)(7) states: “It shall be unlawful for any person to reserve or attempt to reserve a parking space, or prevent any vehicle from parking on a public street through his/her presence in the roadway, the use of hand-signals, or by placing any box, can, crate, handcart, dolly or any other device, including unauthorized pavement, curb or street markings or signs in the roadway.”
The exact site of the parking disagreement is uncertain; however, it is said to have taken place in Brooklyn.
Sesame Place issued a new apology Thursday night after a video appeared to capture a costumed character ignoring two Black children during a parade last weekend at the theme park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
“We sincerely and wholeheartedly apologize to the Brown family for what they experienced. To be very clear, what the two young girls experienced, what the family experienced, is unacceptable. Sesame Place
It happened in our park, with our team, and we own that. It is our responsibility to make this better for the children and the family and to be better for all families,” a portion of the statement read.
Jodi Brown says her daughter and niece were snubbed by the Rosita character on Saturday, July 16.
The nine-second video, posted to Instagram by Brown, showed the character high-fiving a white child and woman, then gesturing “no” and walking away from the two girls who had their arms stretched out for a hug and high-five during the parade.
Brown says the character was intentionally racist toward her family.
“Right after the character passed them, there was another little girl next to them who was of a different race and (Rosita) hugged her,” the mother said.
Brown was joined by her attorney B’Ivory LaMarr Wednesday for a press conference outside Sesame Workshop in New York City.
LaMarr said they don’t want to sue the company and it isn’t about money; he said it is about making things right.
“You told these kids for years ‘come and play, everything’s OK, friendly neighbors there, that’s where we meet, can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?’
And once these kids figure out how to get to Sesame Street…they reach out in open arms to these friendly neighbors, for what? To be dismissed? To be rejected? And to leave your park inferior,” LaMarr said.
An NYC man was indicted on hate crime charges for allegedly attacking two women of Korean descent inside the Rockefeller Center subway station while yelling anti-Asian slurs, the Manhattan district attorney announced Wednesday.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a release that Derrick Johnson, 40, from NYC was charged with two counts of assault in the third degree as a hate crime and two counts of aggravated harassment in the second degree.
“The subway is central to our city, and riders of all backgrounds deserve safety when they travel,” Bragg said.
“The rise of bias-driven crimes is unacceptable,” he added. “We are expanding our office’s Hate Crimes Unit to enhance these prosecutions while increasing community engagement and other preventative measures.”
Court records claim Johnson threw an unknown liquid at the two women in the subway station on May 8 and spit on them, according to the release. Johnson also reportedly made racially offensive remarks at them.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” he allegedly said.
Johnson charged at one of the women, who fell to the ground and sustained significant bruising to her arms and legs in addition to swelling in her head and jaw, the release stated.
The New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Dashboard indicates roughly one in every five hate crimes in NYC targets Asians, based on a year’s worth of the most recent data.
As organizations tackle topics related to race and equity in an unprecedented way, there’s a tacit tension constraining and constricting many of these very necessary, overdue conversations. Racist
Indeed, many White colleagues (in particular) are deathly afraid of being labeled “racist,” so instead of engaging, questioning, learning and contributing, they largely sit on the sidelines nervously itching for a topic change.
Much of that discomfort is the result of an anachronistic, fundamentally skewed concept of what racism actually looks like and what the term “racist” really means in 2022.
As Equal Justice Initiative Founder Bryan Stevenson reflects on the “emancipation” of African Americans post-Civil War, he insists, “Slavery doesn’t end. It just evolves.”
Similarly, racism didn’t end. It too evolved. With the acknowledgement of this tragic “evolution,” it’s important to recognize that what is considered and meant by the term “racist” today is very different from what was considered “racist” in decades or centuries past—and the conflation of the two oftentimes becomes a stumbling block for productive exchange and real progress.
Indeed, if we’re to effectively navigate “racism 3.0” (the post-Civil Rights Movement era), we must use more evolved, nuanced language about race, and immediately labeling someone a “racist” because they said or did something racially offensive can oftentimes create more problems than it solves as a result of this fundamental misunderstanding.
Given the country’s brutal history of white supremacy and racial violence, the term “racist” typically conjures up the worst mental images—Bull Conner ordering children to be hosed, KKK members torching homes and churches, white supremacists lynching men, women and children and leaving their bodies hanging to terrorize the Black community, etc.
As a result, for many (particularly within the White community), they consider those people the racists. Indeed, that stunted mental paradigm creates a “good/bad binary” as Robin DiAngelo explains in her New York Times bestseller White Fragility.
“What’s that all about? Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes,” Patterson, 75, told the British newspaper. “It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.”
Now, Patterson is facing backlash from critics and writers who say the author has blatantly ignored recent data showing how the publishing industry has been and remains “a business that is owned by white men.”
In a diversity self-audit from Penguin Random House, the publisher found that about 75 percent of the contributors during that period were White.
Just 6 percent were Black, while 5 percent were Hispanic, the audit shows. The company also acknowledged that more than 74 percent of its employees were White.
A 2019 survey from children’s publisher Lee and Low Books found that 85 percent of the publishing staffers who acquire and edit books are White people.
A 2020 report from the New York Times found a similar result across the U.S. publishing industry, with 89 percent of the books written in 2018 being penned by White writers.
Patterson uses ghostwriters to help him publish multiple titles a year.
On Tuesday afternoon, Patterson tweeted an apology, saying: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers.”
With more than 300 titles to his name, Patterson is one of the publishing world’s most prolific writers.
Starting in 1932, government medical workers in rural Alabama withheld treatment from unsuspecting Black men infected with syphilis so doctors could track the disease and dissect their bodies afterwards.
For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as US government researchers purposely let hundreds of Black men die of syphilis in Alabama so they could study the disease, a foundation in New York covered funeral expenses for the deceased.
The payments were vital to survivors of the victims in a time and place ravaged by poverty and racism.
Altruistic as they might sound, the payments – $100 at most – were no simple act of charity: They were part of an almost unimaginable scheme.
To get the money, widows or other loved ones had to consent to allowing doctors to slice open the bodies of the dead men for autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease the victims were told was “bad blood”.
Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted in 1972, the organisation that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, is publicly apologising to the descendants for its role.
The apology and an accompanying monetary donation to a descendants’ group, the Voices of our Fathers Legacy Foundation, will be presented on Saturday in Tuskegee during a gathering of children and other relatives of men who were part of the study.
The current president of the fund, Christopher F Koller, said there was no easy way to explain how its leaders in the 1930s decided to make the payments, or to justify what happened.
“The upshot of this was real harm,” Koller told The Associated Press in an interview.
Generations later, some Black people in the US still fear government healthcare because of what’s called the “Tuskegee effect”.
Endowed in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, part of a wealthy and well-connected New York family, the fund was one of the nation’s first private foundations.
Tension choked the air when a ten-foot-tall cross, wrapped in gasoline-soaked rags, burned wildly, as if to set the night on fire. The cross burned in the fall of 1980, on Jefferson Avenue, which runs through several Black neighborhoods that constitute the East Side of Buffalo, New York, and it punctuated a wave of terror in and around the city.
A month earlier, on September 22nd, a Black fourteen-year-old boy had been shot in the head three times. Over the next two days, three other Black men were shot and killed.
After ballistics testing, the police concluded that all four had been killed by the same weapon. Then, in early October, the bodies of two more Black men were found, beaten and stabbed to death. Both men had had their hearts cut out of their chests.
Several days after that, the cross was lit ablaze. The following day, on October 10th, a nurse walked in on a white man trying to strangle a Black man who was lying prone in a hospital bed.
He survived, but the attack left him incapacitated and in need of surgery. In the course of those weeks, six African American males had been viciously murdered.
The streak of deaths overlapped with a series of bewildering disappearances of Black children in Atlanta, which came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, heightening the terror.
In Black neighborhoods across Buffalo, rumors swirled that the killings were the work of the Ku Klux Klan. During one of the funerals, the Associated Press reported, two carloads of whites drove by with a “mannequin with grotesque, red painted head wounds,” and threw red paint on the hearse.
City officials scoffed at the idea that organized racists were involved in the killings, and a state N.A.A.C.P. official allowed that the attacks may have been committed by a single killer.