November 25, 2020, 10:30 am*
A video of a Black man standing up to a white woman who allegedly cussed out an eight-year-old child for riding his bike near her has gone viral as people praise the man for defending the children and calling out racist, gentrifying behavior. The woman appeared to claim that the small child deliberately tried to hit her multiple times, but later in the video says that he was simply racing down the sidewalk without regard for pedestrian safety.
Advertisement
Hide
That might have something to do with him being eight years old, as the dismayed man tries to explain to her.
Advertisement
Hide
Advertisement
Hide
“An eight-year-old kid? You want to curse an eight-year-old kid out,” he says to her. “If that was a white kid, would you do that?”
The woman claims she would have also cursed out a white eight-year-old, which might not be the fantastic defense she thinks it is.
The camera pans to show a small child on a bike across the street as they argue and gesture toward him. It sounds like the bike may have been motorized in some way, but the sidewalks also appear quite spacious in spite of the woman’s objections to the child riding on them.
Advertisement
Hide
“In your community, where do [kids] ride bikes at?” the man asks. “On the street,” says the woman over the sound of street traffic.
“Okay, well guess what, this is our community, this is our playground,” says the man.
While bike riding on the street may be safe in suburban neighborhoods, in more urban areas, sidewalks can be the only safe places for kids to play. The woman claims to be part of the community, but the Black man points out that she probably didn’t grow up in a place like that and was only living there due to the process of gentrification.
Advertisement
Hide
“Yeah, y’all came here under gentrification,” he says. “This is where we born and raised, all our life, this is our backyard. We don’t have backyards.”
The woman then begins to make excuses, saying that she spends money in the community, but the life-long resident has no patience for this.
Advertisement
Hide
“What do money have to do with character?” he asks. “That’s an eight-year-old kid. If his mother was here, you’d be fighting over you threatening her child.”
She then attacks the eight-year-old’s character, which hasn’t had nearly as much time to develop as hers, and claims that the small child threatened her three times. When the man asks how the kid threatened her, she tries to deflect by pretending to care about the child’s safety, but he asks her again.
Advertisement
Hide
“By going next to me on the sidewalk at a fast speed,” she says.
With a little more pushing, she admits that the way the child “threatened” her was by “tearing around the block without looking what he’s doing.” In other words, by acting like a typical eight-year-old trying to have fun.
The video cuts out after the man calls the situation “sad.” Tyrone Bryant posted the video on Sunday and has already racked up 2.3 million views, with thousands of people commenting to praise the Black man for standing up for his community and trashing the white woman.
Advertisement
Hide
“She really wanted that child to play in traffic instead of on the sidewalk,” wrote one Twitter user.
“This is an example of folks needing to learn to ‘mind your business,'” said Bryan Newton. “And I love how this dude was like ‘this is our neighborhood, this is our yard. We don’t have lawns here’. Which is an excellent point on how children operate and play in the city vs the Suburbs.”
*First Published: November 24, 2020, 3:02 pm
0 Comments